Description
Leandra Di Buelna | –” x –” Unframed | Acrylic on Canvas | I-BURUU
He was born in Houston, to Mary Petronella, a member of the Sicilian restaurant clan, and a handsome father who was part Cherokee and part German. His father drank heavily and died in a car accident after the couple lost their second child, a young girl, to spinal meningitis. Leo was two.
He and his mother ended up in California with an Italian boxer whom he doesn’t want to honor by calling stepfather. “I was raised by a fist,” he said.
Bill Arning, the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, said he was fascinated less by the imagery than by Buelna’s compulsion to create, for so many years, without much of a desire to share his work like well-known outsider artists such as Forrest Bess. Arning said he likely would have discouraged a younger artist from making imagery that looks so cartoony and “heavy-metal illustrative,” but he was fascinated because of Buelna’s age and passion.
