Canvas: Leif Kruse

By Paulette Perhach

Leif Kruse never looks at his paintings with a satisfied smile. He never thinks, “Oh, I like that.”

More likely, Leif will just stare. And when that doesn’t help, he’ll make himself a drink or go for a ride on his bike. He’ll get away.

“I’m probably my worst critic,” said Leif, 26. “I’ve gotten some nice comments. I choose to ignore most of them.”

After four years at Flagler, painting all-nighters and slapping coats on the canvas to get assignments done, Leif disregarded his talents for a year.

“I had fun, I rode my bike a lot,” he said. “But at the same time it was always a thought in the back of my head, that you can’t just leave it. You kind of have to. And that’s a little bit of a burden to have. … I just kind of feel worthless if I don’t do it.”

He wonders if he should, or if he could, free his attentions from the task of creating art and move them toward the components of a normal life – wife, kids, mortgage, car payment, must-see tv.

“But, I feel like when I get old, when I’m 60 or 70, I’d rather look back and say I was wandering around painting stuff and doing random things and traveling around than doing the normal day-to-day routine. Routines are bad,” he said.

Leif grew up without them. Using St. Augustine as home port, his family sailed around the Caribbean. His father would paint traditional, historical paintings as they cruised about for years at a stretch.

The family returned in time for Leif to attend St. Augustine High School.

Then at Flagler College, he started in graphic design, but got sick of working with a mouse and quit computers for canvases. Admittedly, he didn’t try his hardest back then. There were many all-nighters when the deadlines came.

Now he only has his harshest critic and no deadlines. Leif can now spend more time on his paintings.

Once, after working on a canvas for about five months, he painted over the entire surface in frustration. Then, in four days, he painted a picture over it that actually pleased him.

Most Leif Kruse paintings have two or three failures underneath.

“(Painting) probably makes me more angry than anything,” he said. “I just feel like I have to keep
doing it.”

His next plan is to paint a series based on the idea of the seven deadly sins.

“I’m not religious, but it just seems like a really interesting subject,” he said.

The subject matter works well with his use of black, white and red, especially when cardinals show up as a representation of the four virtues.

“I used to do everything in only black and white,” he said. “Red just seems like the color of passion, life, vitality, kind of, blood, whatever, anger. Red roses are like love. It seems like everything.”

The colors add to the surreal look of his paintings.

“I want to make something you can’t just go out and look at,” he said. “I don’t want to paint something you could take a photo of.”

So these will be his ghosts now, these seven sins that call out to be painted. Though it’s mostly frustration he predicts, he goes on simply because he has to, and in the anticipation of the layer of paint that actually survives.

“Every once in a while, once or twice a year, I’ll make something that really turned out well. I’ll actually like it, for a while. And maybe it’s just that one thing that could make up for all the bad stuff I did,” he said.

“It’s like how you buy a CD because you like one song on it that’s really good, even if the whole rest of the CD sucks. But you still listen to it, because you like that one song. It’s worth getting it for that one song.”