The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Stacy Leeman
Columbus Ohio 43209 United States Home Phone: 6142390923 Website: https://stacyleeman.com/
Bio
Stacy Leeman’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work is held in public and private collections, including Princeton University. Ms. Leeman has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors. She received grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center. Her work is represented by Brandt- Roberts Gallery in Columbus, Rutledge Street Gallery in Camden, South Carolina, Wheelhouse Art in Louisville, Kentucky and 530 Burns Gallery in Sarasota, Florida.
Ms. Leeman earned her BA in studio art from Oberlin College and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her studies abroad have included a year in Jerusalem and a semester at Parsons School of Design in Paris. Ms. Leeman lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her family.
Visit stacyleeman.com to learn more about Leeman’s art.
Artist Statement
“Consider not only how terrifying change can be but also how exhilarating.”
Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss Creativity, and Change
Painting for me is, like life, elusive. The more you think you understand the less you really do. As Maggie Smith implies, change is inevitable, but not always predictable.
In my studio practice, I approach this attempt at defining a feeling through a style I refer to as gestural symbolism. As a gestural painter influenced by Abstract Expressionism I utilize mark making and juxtaposing incongruous colors to create a unified and absorbing image. As a symbolist, I develop a set of symbols in terms of colors, shapes, and underlying images for each series.
I begin each series in the same manner: Something I’ve stumbled upon, often a text of some sort, that requires teasing out. It’s not the type of teasing done in a literature class, but it needs to be mulled over in my studio with tools, paintbrushes, symbols, canvas, wood, panels, pigments.
I work in pairs, painting the surfaces and then adding and sometimes subtracting paint with a rubber squeegee type instrument. It’s a dance. Add, subtract, step back, study, and once the surface is saturated the painting is set aside until a later session that day or the next week when it is rotated 90 degrees to get a fresh perspective on the painting and consider each area of the picture plane equally. The bottom of the image becomes the side and the painting is begun anew until, as Georgia O’Keeffe says, “I get at the real meaning of things.”
The beginning paintings in a series for me are fraught with excitement and fear as I know not the direction the works will move. This not knowing, though, is part of the thrill of painting. “You should have a plan,” a writer friend of mine once said, “but you better be wrong.”