Artist Statement

"I am student of color, design, light and shadow, and their interaction with texture and form. I take pleasure in contemplating nature at length and in depth. I devote time to learning the construction of a duck’s wing, the mechanism of a hawk’s talon, understanding the patterns on an owl, depicting the sheen on an orchid leaf. Studying one flower petal overlapping another. Watching the golden light creeping up the trunks of the trees as the sun goes down. Capturing the dawn exploding across the sky with a palette knife. Anticipating a light effect on the mountain or clouds. Painting willows on a hot summer day or retreating into the forest to paint a woodland interior. How to paint the atmosphere, making the invisible visible. Sometimes art does not render completion, or elaborate compositions. Sometimes it’s the result of close observation as in meditation. Sometimes it’s just “being” and blending colors with a brush, watching one pigment melt into another, working out details, and being still.”

Artist Biography

Leslie Watkins is an artistic descendant of the Old Lyme Art Colony, considered the bedrock of American Impressionist landscape painting whose luminaries include Childe Hassam, William Metcalf and Frank Vincent DuMond. At the Art Students League of New York, DuMond taught Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Norman Rockwell, and Frank Mason. Mason later taught Watkins the prismatic palette, alla prima (painting wet on wet) painting, and techniques of the Old Masters. Watkins continues these cherished traditions.

Watkins is a plein-air landscape painter. When a scene attracts her attention, she paints an oil sketch in one session, and sometimes returns for several more studies. In the studio, these studies serve as reference for larger compositions in which she attempts to capture a sense of place, and the quality of the day.

Watkins has exhibited at The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, The National Arts Club, The Salmagundi Club, The Union League Club, The Hudson Valley Art Association, The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, The Lyme Art Association and elsewhere, including Japan. Leslie's illustrations have appeared internationally on postage stamps, in and on books and magazines. Clients have included Fine Gardening, Tiffany & Co., Caspari, Disney's Animal Kingdom, and Nickelodeon.

Leslie has taught art classes at the Lyme Art Association, the Washington Art Association, at Skidmore College through the International Womens' Writing Guild, the Garrison Art Center in NY, The Berkshire Botanical Garden, and the Bushnell-Sage Library in Sheffield, MA through the Housatonic Valley Art League.  She offers plein air painting workshops and watercolor classes throughout New England, the Berkshires and in and around Norfolk, CT.

Watkins is available for workshops through out America and Europe. For more information please visit www.LeslieWatkins.com, or she can be reached at (860) 542-3920.