Featured Artists

Carol Lesher
Artist Statement

The work represented in this collection is reflective of my time alone in the studio creating art during the pandemic. As is typical, I looked to the outside world and found quiet beauty in my surroundings. As I embarked on this journey of forced solitude, I focused my attention on creating almost every day. My paintings emerged as beacons of light, transforming the landscape into shapes, patterns and color that lifted me up and brought me a great sense of peace. It is with pleasure that I am able to share this work with you.

I paint to explore the depth of my connection to the world — to process and articulate my relationship with the aspects of nature that permeate my everyday experience.

My process is intuitive, based on direct response to the beauty in the natural world that surrounds me. I confront the persistence of inner turmoil: anxiety, fear, mortality. I look to the wider world as a calming force, for inspiration I can draw within, internalize and then express onto the canvas. In doing so, I convert uncertainty into order. Painting centers me. The act of creating opens up renewed possibilities and infinities of feeling. It’s my way of tapping into something greater than myself and translating feeling into form.

My work interrogates the balance between representation and abstraction. I’m attracted to rhythms of nature, and inspired by simplicity of form. My paintings are primarily landscapes and, every so often, interpretations of the sea. Environments refracted, filtered through soft light and flattened color. Modern, yet grounded in observation and emotion, they encompass fields of grain and fields of vision; oceans of deep water and oceans of color.

I trace lineaments of trees and surf, horizons, interstices of space, liminal breaths between ground and sky. I explore the structure and order that resides in nature. In a sense, I tell stories with my brush. Not complex narrative tapestries, but elemental stories, manifestations of collective knowledge and a sense of deep, evolutionary time.

My process is an accumulation of moments, each with their attendant small excitements. I map out relationships and boundaries; I add layers; I subtract and simplify. Line and color, shape and form, texture and physicality: these qualities merge in the gestures of my brushwork. I observe the tactile surfaces of my paintings, play with rhythms, with harmony and space. As I work, the surface ebbs and evolves, then settles, like a sea after a storm.
Though my process is instinctual and embodied, it’s designed to engender shape and structure. I draw on movement and energy — making marks, moving paint — to create work that, with patience and a bit of luck, finally resonates.
As my paintings evolve, beauty emerges from the tensions inherent in this process.