Meet the Rockford artist beautifying neighborhoods with murals

Yahoo

19 hours ago

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — Jesse Leach is a Rockford artist looking to beautify neighborhoods with new murals.
You can find him at the corner of Charles Street and Center Terrace in Rockford, working on a mural he calls 'Food For Thought.' It was commissioned by the owners of Da Catch, which is a restaurant on that same corner.
Leach used his phone as a guide as he painted faces on the wall. He says he wasn't initially drawn to painting when he began his journey as an artist. He used a colored pencil. It took a suggestion from another area artist to get him into the other art form.
'Roni Golan, he told me, after he saw all my art, color pencil, he was just like, 'why don't you just paint it all?' So, that's what started my journey six years ago, painting,' Leach said.
He's been able to work quickly on the mural.
'I did that side over there within a week,' he said while working around the corner.
He explained his process.
'From start to finish, we primed the wall, we scraped everything down. I do the sketch out. After sketching it out, it's going back over the lines, just kind of bringing the picture together more and more,' Leach explained while painting. 'After this, it's the color fill. That's when I just start throwing colors all over the place just to fill in the gaps to minimize all the white, or minimize the background so I know where I'm going and I can use everything once it's all put together.'
'And then going back over three or four times,' he said. 'Like I did over on that wall over there, I went back and forth up and down the wall probably like three-four times before I was satisfied by how everything looked, and I still feel like I can go back over the lines even more.'
'Then it's the shading and the highlights,' he said. 'That's just going back and getting the picture to have some depth, so it's now starting to pop out at you a little bit, so it gives you that 3D effect almost.'
He says the most important part of the entire process is trying to inspire others through his art.
'I hope I inspire people to wake up and want to do any form of creativity that they know, even if it's singing, dancing, anything,' he said. 'Just wake up one morning, go downtown or something, or be out and just have a ball… express yourself that way.'
'It's therapeutic,' he said. 'While you focus on the painting, you don't have time to worry about other things. You're too busy tapped out of the world and tapped into this, into the art. For the soul, it's freedom.'
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