Lesley Anderson

Lesley Anderson received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design and her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University in Montreal. She currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Born near Toronto, Ontario, she grew up on British Columbia’s west coast, where she has lived and worked most of her career. Anderson has been the recipient of several residencies and awards, including the 2015 Tom Hopkins Graduate Award in Painting. She has exhibited in group and solo shows across Canada, France, and China.

Artist Statement:

Lesley Anderson’s paintings embrace minimal and gestural languages. Drawing from sources such as collage, colour-field painting, and hard edge, she explores relationships between colour harmonies, geometric and organic forms.

Anderson’s inventory of compositional materials includes acrylic, ink, airbrush, paper cut-outs, masking and digital methods. Her palette has an earthly calm, and use of varied media yields a rich, flexible visual language through which Anderson articulates her idiomatic abstraction, gesturing in one instance to the drama of expressionism and in another to the precision of hard edge. Some works rest in stillness, employing unmodulated opaque colour fields. Others hop and skip, punctuated by discrete and playful figures. Paintings take shape through dripping, splashing, pouring, and collage, as well as through traditional brush work and the play between positive and negative space. Synthesizing painterly forms through an improvisational approach, Anderson immerses herself within the flow of her water-media, searching out the right formal combinations, be they curvilinear, figurative, geometric, or something more indeterminate, as if matter in phase-change or a memory half formed.