bio

Lesley Frenz (b. 1972) is an artist working in acrylics and watercolors. Born and raised in coastal North Florida, she received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Florida where she studied Art History and Painting. After working in various creative industries, Frenz married and left Florida in 2011 to travel the West and Northwest with her husband. While traveling, she began a successful art blog and began freelance work on behalf of galleries and artists, but never stopped painting. Years of travel and living among such incredible beauty spilled out in January 2013 as she began a serious studio practice while continuing to travel. An avid hiker and backpacker, Frenz finds inspiration in wild places and her studio practice is centered around the exploration of the intersectionality between the spiritual and earthbound in the form of abstracted landscape paintings.

Frenz began exhibiting work in 2015, followed soon by her first solo exhibition in 2016, she is currently represented by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle, WA and Art & Light Gallery in Greenville, SC.

Hanging up their travelling shoes, Frenz and her husband have found home in Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town nestled in the Skagit Valley between the North Cascade mountains and the Salish Sea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

artist statement

Growing up in North Florida and years of travel through the West and Northwest have filled my inspiration cup full to overflowing.  As I walk miles of wilderness trails, I find myself enraptured with the way the fog settles between mountains, how the light finds its way through the tallest of Redwoods, the kiss of sun glistening on coastal waters.  It is these moments that capture my heart and my imagination and move me to put paint to canvas. I carry them with me in photographs and memory until I am ready to allow them to spill forth in color.  

Through paintings in acrylic and watercolor, I am seeking to capture the feeling not just of a place, but of a moment.  Pulling forth from those memories, I begin each painting, building up layer upon layer of color and transparent glazes, allowing the composition to emerge as it will, until the surface is transformed into a representation of an experience of a locale and moment in time.  It is my goal that these surfaces convey the sense of atmosphere and mystery I find in these wild and untamed places, mirroring the wildness in us all.