Painting clouds is a primary language for Leslie, a way to celebrate sky beauty with others.

Countless friends and clients send Leslie their cloud photos, meaningful moments they want to share.

Although much of her formal art training and experience is from working in a plein air landscape tradition, Leslie takes an abstract expressionist approach to painting clouds. The result? You see less of a recording of sky and land more of an emotional response to cloud experiences, featuring color and texture.

Abstraction has played a big role in Leslie’s vision of a quiet landscape: because clouds can be both transparent and opaque, they both hold and reflect colors and light.

When oil paints could not convey Leslie’s visual ideas, she turned to making small interior spaces or boxes: the miniscule handheld spaces speak of enclosure rather than calling attention to the openness of sky or the indulgence of color. Leslie asks her painting process as well as her sculptures to help her explore ideas of freedom, solitude and renewal.    

BIO

An Alabama native, Leslie spent formative years in a creative family. With an architect dad and artist, entrepreneur and art educator mom, she could hardly choose any undergrad major but studio art. She focused her creative energies into a BFA degree in oil painting and earned a P-12 certificate in art education from Birmingham-Southern College; she graduated with honors and was given The Phyllis M. Nielsen Senior Book Award for Outstanding Performance in Student Teaching.

With a dream of focusing on a painting career, she moved to the DC area where Art Mentor Joyce McCarten guided her to begin exhibiting in the DC area. Leslie explored new abstract methods, taking courses at The Torpedo Factory in Alexandria's Old Town and at The Corcoran's Georgetown campus, where she was awarded the Linda Rosenbaum Scholarship to continue her studies. She was fortunate to take abstract drawing and painting classes under the direction of fellow Tuscaloosa, AL native, Bill Christenberry and to work with collage guru, Mindy Weisel. Leslie traveled to Provence, France to better study "colour" and plein air landscapes with British artist Richard Kenton Webb.

Leslie established a studio discipline and painting business while the usual life distractions ebbed and flowed: working a graphic design day job, becoming a wife and mom, owning and operating a retail fine art supply store for nine years in downtown Staunton, VA, and teaching in local schools and art studios. 

B.C. (Before COVID), Leslie exhibited & won numerous awards at regional outdoor art festivals in Virginia’s idyllic Shenandoah Valley. Leslie has taught artists from ages 3 to 70 in traditional classroom settings, at a children’s museum, in workshops and summer art programs, through local professional art schools and community college continuing ed courses, and she currently teaches art to elementary-aged artists in Augusta County Public Schools. She and her writer husband have two sons. The family resides in Staunton, VA, where their stunning view of the valley is a favorite part of living downtown.