Leslie Andelin

Leslie Andelin has been immersed in the arts since she stole her first brush at age three. After earning her BFA at UC Santa Cruz she moved to Florence to study at Studio Arts College International. Her graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute led to an MFA in painting, a critically acclaimed series of cityscapes and naturescapes, gallery representation, and Oils, a lush retrospective of her paintings to date. While Leslie’s abstractions and representational work explore the patterns and repetitions of nature, cities, and landscapes, her true subjects have always been light and emotion. While the abstractions guide viewers toward a specific emotion, and her abstract work strives to elicit emotions directly, all are first and foremost about states of mind. Leslie’s work has appeared widely, including the Florence Biennale; the Limner Gallery in New York; George Krevsky Fine Art, Meridian Gallery, SF Convention & Visitors Center, and SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco, Lite Rail Gallery in Sacramento; the Triton Art Museum in Silicon Valley; the Museum of Arts Downtown in Los Angeles; and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Her paintings and sculptures are featured in private collections and corporate venues across Europe, Japan, and the United States and have been loaned through the SF MOMA Artists Gallery. Born in Los Angeles in 1963, Leslie lived and worked in San Francisco from 1988 until 2016. She currently resides in Marin.

Painting the cities is a way of bring everything back together – to express that we are in fact part of this planet, that we belong here. If I can take something I see and single out what makes it beautiful to me, then I’m resonating with something around me; the feeling is one of belonging there. Once I really started looking at San Francisco, I became very attracted to the weather, the light, the fog…these imparted a sense of belonging, of peace. That started me on a path to finding a way to paint that emotion itself, rather than painting the physical images that elicited it or the entire balance in which that emotion fit. The city became a structure into which I could start putting the elements of emotional conveyance; the light and emotions and contrasts. Of course to do that, one still has to start by unraveling the complex abstraction of it all. You have to try to understand how all those little marks ultimately say ‘city,’ or ‘downtown,’ or ‘houses’. At this point I feel like I have achieved a vocabulary for that.