Exhibition Information
Emily Leonard's Paintings
Emily Leonard received her BFA from Furman University and continued her
art studies in Cortona, Italy. She has had exhibitions in Nashville (TN), Greenville (SC), Scottsdale (AZ), Italy and Seattle. Leonard lives and works in Seattle.
Click here for information about Leonard's September 2008 solo exhibition at the Daniel Kany Gallery: The Fallow Season.
The paintings of Emily Leonard display a never-ending hunt for spaces and
timelessness. "From a process perspective," she explains, "I am always
looking for a place that hints of both past memory and future awareness."
In other words, Leonard sees memory as a launching point of the past but
for the future: without the future component, memory is lost. By focusing
on memory, Leonard concedes her deep commitment to finding beauty in truth
rather than in creating new and convenient fictions. The artist is deeply
aware of the subjectivity of individual perspective and how among even
people close in time and world outlook, viewpoints differ: philosophical,
historical, ideological, and otherwise. Leonard's goal of her paintings is
to "define beauty as something very honest." It is through her respect for
people that she has decided to eschew any brazen moral content and seek
the deeply experiential. She offers places where people can be alone with themselves. Any apparent commitment to the image of isolation is
quickly redirected by its unusual intensity of appeal. Leonard's paintings
are deeply Romantic works. As subjects, her dusk and dawn are entry points
to dreams or their silky exits. Her view of nature is heroic and lush. And
yet it is wholly devoid of beasts or actors playing narrative roles. The
heroic element is far closer to the traveler who, alone and unobserved,
takes the road less traveled.