Artist Marcus Leslie Singleton is creating a journal published in paint, creating artworks inspired by the small, often overlooked day-to-day conversations and expressions that unfold around him—interactions that take place behind closed doors, intimate moments shared between friends, family and partners. He tells Alix-Rose Cowie why he wants to capture the universal language we use to express love.
Artist Marcus Leslie Singleton’s first paintings were abstract. His focus was on understanding how oil paint behaves, mixing and blending the fatty pigments to achieve his desired colors and consistency. But within these layers there was more he wanted to say. He looked to his favorite writers for instruction, noticing how they fleshed out their characters and developed their plots, and began making candid artworks of friends, family, lovers and his cat, Lint. “I just decided to paint the people I was with, what I was doing and what I was feeling—almost like journaling,” he says. “It took me a while to get over the fear hump,” he remembers; his internal line of questioning was something like: “Are people going to judge me for showing this side of me? Does this even matter to people? Is this boring? Is this dumb?” But painting the experiences close to his heart resonated strongly with others, and set into motion an unfolding autobiography published in paint.
Painting a life is license to make anything you please. “I’ve painted about sports; I’ve painted about sex, about breakups, about death, race, spirituality,” Singleton says. If you wanted to write the “smashburger” description, as he jokingly puts it, his work has been summarized as depictions of intimate, everyday scenes that broach bigger themes. But the small moments in his work—“the little things people say in conversations or how they express their love to one another”—and the umbrella themes like queer identity or the politics of living in the USA feel equally important to him. “If something impacts me enough to make a picture about it, then I don’t think that it’s small at all,” he says. The details he notices, and the presence required to notice them, feel expansive to him. “There’s a universe in there.”
Singleton’s first solo museum exhibition opens on June 20 at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Many of the paintings are set inside a living room or bedroom: places where one spends time alone or with significant others and close friends; places where one can take off their shoes, their bras and their armor. “The scenes are articulations on intimacy and how that is a worldwide language,” he says. “On top of that, I’m expounding on my journey with understanding my own sexuality and what it means to be a queer person of color.” In the slurry of American politics dehumanizing trans and queer people, he hopes that his art can have an impact by showing that “people are just people, doing things that everybody else does.” A few of Singleton’s works from the past year show a couple lying in bed together, at ease in their naked bodies, a sliver of moody sky visible through the open window; a close-up of a much-needed hug; summer cherries left out on a countertop; and a man reclining at home with a cigarette, a blue vase of picked flowers on the table beside him.
Singleton usually works from the camera roll on his flip phone, filled with random snapshots of things that catch his eye and experiences he wants to remember. These low res images become the foundation of his paintings, through a process that begins with making a loose drawing from the photograph, and then using a projector to enlarge the drawing to create a template for the painting. On an artist's residency trip to Ivory Coast a year back, his flip phone was in perpetual camera mode: inspiration and "I want to remember this" moments were everywhere he looked, and he's still making paintings from the snaps he took.
He was particularly taken by a woman he saw posing at the swimming pool for a spontaneous photo shoot. "She had such a commanding presence, and she was also really stylish and a good swimmer," he says. "There was such a feminine power there, and I thought it was important to highlight a Black woman fully relaxed and present, embodying boldness in every aspect of who they are." In his painting, she strikes a model's pose in a red bikini, a swimming cap and goggles. "I knew when I was making that painting, it would be good."
The themes that inform Singleton's art: identity, everyday-ness, home and memory all expand irrevocably through seeing new things, and his trip to West Africa continues to influence the work he makes now. "There were colors I was seeing there that you normally wouldn't see in your day-to-day life here in New York," he says. "Just within the sunset, an almost fully pink sky was something I'd never seen before. So when I came back, I realized that I was maybe being a little more rigid in my color choices than I had thought." He's now started to choose colors informed by how something made him feel. Enjoying this newfound freedom, he's playing with the possibilities of how a work can be read differently-an everyday scene rendered more ethereal or dreamlike.
In bits of artist bios, exhibition statements and Instagram captions strung across the internet, Singleton is defined as "self-taught." He's sometimes grappled with how that distinguishes him in the art world, but he also likes to think of making art as something that shouldn't be taught at all. "My approach to making work is just how I see the world. It's not how I was taught to see the world," he says. "Painting is a way for me to say that I'm really paying attention to what's happening in my immediate community and almost being a journalist in the way I'm recording what is important to me," he says. And through the translation of these stories, the diarist becomes an artist.