Fon Leigh Paints the Underground Spring She Wakes Up To Every Morning

Fon Leigh keeps a Post-it note and a pen on her nightstand, and has for as long as she can remember. It is, she says, the only way to catch what shows up first thing in the morning before it disappears. "Most of my inspiration comes from dreams; I've always had an extremely overactive imagination," she says. "I actually keep a Post-it note and pen next to my bed so I can draw first thing in the morning."

What arrives from those half-waking sketches is a body of work built almost entirely around one question, examined from every angle a dream will allow: a woman fused with a house, three faces curled inside an oyster shell, a chest opened to show roots growing straight into a throat. "I paint a lot about identity and connection," she says. "Exploring the connections I have with different parts of myself or other people is vital to my work. It is expressed in a surreal, dreamlike vision of how I see that part of myself or others."

“It felt like I was tapping into an underground spring, a well of art I needed to make that flowed out of me.”

That vision did not arrive early, or easily. Leigh describes herself, for most of her life, as someone without a clear direction. "I was definitely the person people wondered what I'd do. I wasn't really drawn to anything in life, and I was always easy-going with whatever," she says. What changed it was sudden and total: "I had a Spiderman-esque cannon event that totally shifted how I viewed and interacted with life, and I totally fell into making art and truly wanting to be an artist my senior year of college." She reaches for the same image to describe what followed. "It felt like I was tapping into an underground spring, a well of art I needed to make that flowed out of me. It felt more like I was answering a call from my soul than just making to make. Compared to before, it just feels right."

The harder part has been what comes after the painting is finished. Leigh only began sharing her work seriously in the last month, and the response arrived faster than she expected. "It wasn't until last month that I started taking sharing my work seriously, and with that came so much support, but also pressure," she says. "It's been so wonderful receiving support and genuine, earnest interest in my work, but it can be hard to keep up." A former full-time editor before she became an artist, she has found that the pressure lands somewhere unexpected. "I never feel pressure to make art, but I do when I make content," she says. "With art, it's easy not to worry if people like it or not; I also have a good understanding of when I need a break from painting, if I need one. But it can be hard to step away from the camera and edit videos or content. It's actually funny, sometimes I feel more passionately about editing than painting. Painting is so second nature to me, but editing is a skill I've really harnessed. So I've been practicing taking breaks."