color + clouds
Painting clouds has become 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 she has training and experience 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 and 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 magnificently. The subject is always changing and always an intriguing paint subject. Although recognizable, clouds are also naturally occurring abstract forms; they are the perfect bridge between Leslie’s cloudscape paintings and her abstract color works. She enjoys layering oils and papers together in fully abstract compositions, as well as in many of the cloud paintings. By focusing more on process and allowing rich oil colors and texture to have center stage rather than the cloud or barn subject, she can explore and discover surprises that come from layering collage and paint. Working in a fully abstract process as well as working with a recognizable subject matter strengthens and compliments each type of painting; techniques and approaches are basically similar, while one method aims to resolve into something familiar in terms of photorealism, and the other is more of a journey led by the process of layering and of building up the intrigue of color and surface texture.
When oil paints could not convey Leslie’s visual ideas, she turned to making small boxes: minimalist, mysterious and quiet. While prototypes were first constructed with cardboard in 1998, the “bed boxes” have evolved into small cast concrete objects; the miniscule handheld spaces speak to ideas 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 privacy, solitude and simplicity.
BIO
An Alabama native, Leslie spent formative years in an artistic and polymathic family. With an architect dad and artist, entrepreneur and art educator mom, she could hardly choose any major but studio art, focusing her creative energies into a BFA degree in oil painting and earning 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 she armed herself with guidance from Art Mentor Joyce McCarten and began exhibiting in the DC area. She submitted to 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. Since graduating college in Alabama, 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: one in college in Illinois and another in elementary school. The family resides in Staunton, VA, where their stunning view of the valley is a favorite part of living downtown.
