Gwaylon Leaf
Gwaylon Leaf makes abstract paintings and drawings that examine how knowledge, language, and cultural identity take visual form. His work incorporates an asemic language, or writing without a fixed translation, informed by Taoist esoteric calligraphy and Chinese artistic traditions. The resulting marks appear as systems of communication without settling into a single, readable message.
Leaf grew up at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where both of his parents were professors. His father taught art, while his mother taught multicultural counseling and led educational outreach programs focused on children’s career opportunities and women’s professional advancement. Campus life, museum visits, exhibitions, and long philosophical conversations were part of his early environment. Art, collections, and unusual objects were not separate from daily life.
He initially entered UNLV intending to study engineering. The night before orientation, however, he realized that the path did not fit. During the engineering orientation the next day, he left and joined the fine arts orientation instead. He completed a BFA at UNLV, then later earned an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Formal education gave Leaf technical and conceptual grounding, but he emphasizes the importance of learning how to think through a practice. His father recommended books on composition, color theory, art theory, and philosophy, and also taught him to draw and paint. Graduate school brought further formative mentors, including Michael Sarich, whose advice has remained with him: “Don’t make art, just make stuff and let people call that Art.”
Leaf’s experience as a multicultural artist has also shaped his thinking about representation. He encountered challenges to his right to address his cultural background through art, but came to see identity as unavoidable rather than optional. An early motif of a flowering plant with exposed roots emerged during graduate school, when he felt disconnected from his cultural background. The uprooted plant became a way of considering Chinese American diasporic identity and the ongoing work of constructing a self.
His practice has moved through oil paint on canvas, watercolor and ink on paper, water-based and oil media, sculpture, and installation. He now describes his primary method as drawing on canvas with oil paint crayons. Although he continues to experiment, he repeatedly returns to two-dimensional work because its concerns are most closely tied to painting and drawing. Experiments in sculpture and installation have helped him think about how paintings can affect the perception of an entire space.
Failure is a necessary part of that process. “The worst thing to do as an artist is to never experiment and never fail,” Leaf says. New media and unfamiliar methods may become part of his working vocabulary, even if the experiment itself does not continue. What matters is the information a detour produces and how it can be carried back into the larger practice.
Leaf’s recurring questions are philosophical. He is interested in epistemology and ontology, especially in the possibility of giving visible form to knowledge. Asemic writing offers one way to address this. Even when a viewer cannot read a language, the mind often recognizes its shape as language. For Leaf, an undecipherable mark can still suggest communication, memory, or the presence of information.
His current influences include Hung Liu, Timothy Ely, and Abstract Expressionism, as well as Roland Barthes, George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, and the broader asemic-writing movement. He also cites Sappho’s fragments as an example of how language’s arrangement on a two-dimensional plane can change both space and meaning.
Ritual helps establish the conditions for work. Leaf makes tea before entering the studio, treating the taste, warmth, and preparation as a way of setting an emotional and physical tone. He stresses that a ritual does not need to be scientifically or spiritually justified to be useful. It only needs to help the artist begin.
Natural phenomena regularly generate new motifs. Debris settling at the bottom of his swimming pool has inspired paintings, as have celestial movement, gravity, and time. He often reads these arrangements as one might read tea leaves, allowing ordinary materials and larger physical systems to suggest new structures.
Leaf’s days move between sketchbook work, painting, experimentation, reading, and hobbies. He begins with breakfast and often works from sketches into the afternoon, then returns to painting or new experiments after dinner. When he encounters a creative block, he continues making work, sometimes by revisiting a familiar style or trying something new. He sees periods of low inspiration primarily as exhaustion or burnout, not as proof that the work has ended.
He is currently making paintings that ask what it might mean to reverse-engineer contemporary scientific discoveries into archaic esoteric painting and alchemical diagrams. He also hopes to bring book arts into his practice. Across these projects, Leaf continues to build a visual language in which abstraction, science, cultural memory, and unreadable writing can coexist.
