Helge Leiberg’s bold blobs

When we arrive at Helge Leiberg’s studio, we are greeted by jazz music and dancing bodies on large canvases. He explains to us later that he likes to listen to this music while painting because it helps him get into certain moods. He also likes classical music, but the figures in the many paintings in his studio look more like fast, impulsive and exuberant movements, which goes really well with jazz music.

We think the figures Helge paints look like big, dancing, artistic stick figures. Smiling, he says that’s right and then shows us how he does it: with large brushes, one of which is almost as big as a broom, he paints his figures with just a few strokes. The so-called calligraphy brushes can make very thin and very thick strokes. Calligraphy means “the art of beautiful writing” and the brush is actually made to write huge Chinese characters. In a way, Helge’s figures are also like characters that have certain meanings. Often these meanings come from old books, legends and myths that have inspired Helge and which he literally writes into his pictures through the figures.

But not only stories can be discovered in Helge’s pictures. When he was 20 years old, he met a group of dancers who made a big impression on him and who have been appearing in his paintings ever since. For him, dancing as well as painting is about representing what moves him. Expressive, he says, is when this is done with particularly great expression and energy.

Helge’s dancing figures are often surrounded by many splashes of paint, which look as if he had swung the brush particularly quickly and perhaps even danced a bit himself while painting. When we call his attention to the blobs, he admits that he used to clean them up so that his paintings would look more perfect. But he quickly realized that it is also - and perhaps even precisely - these blobs that make the pictures special. It is through them that the movement becomes visible, which fascinated him so much about the dancers. He now finds perfection rather boring.

Before we leave the bright studio house next to the allotments, we transform ourselves into works of art by recreating the poses of the dancers, warriors and other figures. This is not easy, because Helge has frozen them in mid-motion. In the process, we notice how the tension is transferred from the canvas to our bodies. And just like the blobs in Helge’s pictures, the wobbling is then also a bit part of it.