Brian Slattery Photo
When artist Leigh Busby was in middle school, he told an audience gathered at Fellowship Place on Elm Street, his art teacher said he was going to be famous. He didn’t believe her.
“Everyone knew it but me,” he said.
Leigh Busby
Busby’s starting to believe. In 2013 he was part of a show of digital art at the Old Town Hall Museum in Stamford. In August 2014 his work appeared in the first DigiFunArt Festival in Seoul, Korea.
Not bad for someone who, for a lot of reasons, didn’t think he had a chance at being an artist at all.
The 52-year-old artist emigrated with his parents from Trinidad and Tobago to Hackensack, N.J. in 1972. He lived there until he was 40. He worked retail jobs, he said, “with a lot of breakdowns in between.” He was a truck driver. He got married and divorced.
For seven years, he was homeless. “I used my last unemployment check to go to California,” he said. He spent some time in Houston, and ended up in New Haven five years ago. For a little while he lived at Fellowship Place, which offers residence and outpatient services for people recovering from mental illness. He remarried and now lives in East Haven with his wife. His daughter goes to University of New Haven, studying criminal justice.
“It’s just one of the best places I’ve been in the whole country,” he said of New Haven. When he meets people who want to leave, “I say, ‘Let me tell you something: When you go somewhere else there’s only one thing waiting for you there: You.’”
A few years ago, he returned to the art he’d put aside. When he started off, he said, “I had a crippling fear of color.” But then Hill Health Center held an art competition, and he decided to enter. “I told my wife, ‘if I win this, I’m going to go to college.’”
Win it he did, and he enrolled at Gateway. “As soon as I decided it was art for life,” he said, “it all flowed out of me.”
Busby works on an iPad using a Sensu brush, like many painters these days, using photographs he’s taken as references. He also does studies of existing images to hone his technique. “It looks messy when you design, and you just have to keep working it and working it,” he said.
The results are, in a word, painterly, executed with the same eye for exacting detail and emotional nuance found in traditional painting.
Busby turned to digital art first, he said, because he just couldn’t afford paints and canvases. He started off on an Android tablet and moved up to an iPad. As his name in the digital world has grown, so has access to support. When his iPad broke, he replaced it through a GoFundMe campaign.
And lately he’s been “branching out” into the traditional media. The iPad, he told the audience at Fellowship Place, “will give you the courage” to use watercolors, pastels, and acrylics.
The applause that followed Busby’s short talk was appreciation for the artist and the man himself. As Busby said, “most of the work here is pretty colorful. Including me.”
