About
Biography
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.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
2015 - Master of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal, QC
2009 - Bachelor of Fine Arts, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC
Solo & Joint Exhibitions
2019 - Muse, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal, QC
2019 - Metamorphoses, Art Rental & Sales Operated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC
2015 - Inhabited Likeness, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal, QC
2012 - The Divide, Black & Yellow Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
2012 - Heavenly Bodies, The Crying Room Mural Project, Vancouver, B.C.
Group Exhibitions
2023 - New Texas Talent XXX, Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
2023 - Group Show, Britt Design Group, Austin, TX
2022 - Austin Studio Tour Group Exhibition, Big Medium, Austin, TX
2019 - Small Works Exhibition & Sale, Ministry of Casual Living, Victoria, BC
2019 - Lady Parts, Victoria Arts Council, Victoria, BC
2018 - Stratégies d’Abstraction, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal, QC
2015 - 10 year Anniversary Exhibition Part I, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal, QC
2015 - Out of Town, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal, QC
2014 - HotspotVA, Le Commissariat, Paris, FR
2013 - Arts 2013, Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC
2013 - Undefined Abstract/Undefined Expression, OCAD University, Toronto, ON
2013 - Things I bumped into in the Dark, The Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country, BC
2011 - Ill Repute, Unit/Pitt Projects, Vancouver, BC
2011 - 3rd Qijiang International Print Festival, South West University, Chongqing, CN
2011 - Conjure the Ghost, The Other Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff, AB
2011 - Selections from the Gordon and Marion Smith Collection, West Vancouver Museum, BC
2010 - Cultural Agents, Concourse Gallery, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC
2010 - The Glenna Evans Memorial Auction, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, BC
2009 - Between Spaces, Public Art Project with Translink, Vancouver, BC
Awards
2015 - Tom Hopkins Graduate Award in Painting
2015 - Indspire, Building Brighter Futures, Bursary for the Visual Arts
2014 - Concordia Graduate Students Mobility Award
2014 - BC Arts Council, Scholarship Award
2014 - Indspire, Building Brighter Futures, Bursary for the Visual Arts
2013 - BC Arts Council, Scholarship Award