Lesley Wamsley

Brooklyn, NY

Art on view at the Bellevue Botanical Garden

Lesley Wamsley is a plein air painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Nature, observation and documentation are the focus of her landscape painting practice. She earned a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Awarded residencies include the Spruce Art Residency in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the Wassaic Project in Wassiac, New York, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in Ithaca, New York. Her work has been shown nationally including exhibitions at Ladies’ Room in Los Angeles, the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York, and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space in New York City. Wamsley teaches in the Fine Arts Department at Fordham University. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Books Collection and is represented by Good Naked Gallery in Brooklyn.

Garden Days

This painting explores the connection between observation, nature and the passage of time. Made en plein air in the Bellevue Botanical Garden, the painting documents the garden’s unique beauty as it moves through different phases of daylight. Painted over the course of four days, the painting is composed of twelve individual paintings that track the movement of light through the morning, afternoon and evening. Tiled together they form a cohesive image that describes an experience in nature that is both singular and cumulative.

The painting(s) are made in the plein air tradition with oil paint applied wet-into-wet. The unique language of painting, like gesture, brushwork, and reductive touch, communicates the process of looking and responding. Capturing the eternal present, the painting(s) are purposely fresh and lively. The individual paintings tiled together create a composition that can be viewed from different distances suggesting macro and micro perspectives. Garden Days is an invitation for the viewer to ask, “How does it feel to experience this place?”