Lesley Anne Spowart "Follow the Light" Acrylic on Canvas, Small Framed Abstract Painting in Pink, Carmel California Art, Original 12 X 12 Inches, 2024

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Lesley Anne Spowart circles a small orange square with a thickly brushed ring of cream in this small framed abstract … Read more Lesley Anne Spowart circles a small orange square with a thickly brushed ring of cream in this small framed abstract in acrylic on canvas, a charcoal blot below it like a pupil or a lamp gone dark. Coral and blush pink fill most of the ground, broken by vertical slashes of red, a cobalt patch with a pitted, crusted surface and a thin blue band near the base. Fine lines are scratched through the wet acrylic, and a tiny mint-green shape sits at the right like a house seen from far away. Spowart calls herself a colorist, and warm and cool notes trade places across a surface built up and scraped back.

Sized for close looking, it suits a bedroom dresser, a bookshelf, a desk or a narrow stretch of hallway. The blush and coral tones warm a white or pale gray wall, and the cobalt notes pair with navy linen, natural oak and brass. The black frame gives it presence beside lighter objects, and it groups easily with other small works in a salon-style arrangement.

Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 x 1 in (30.5 x 30.5 x 2.5 cm). Framed in black.

Lesley Anne Spowart is a colorist who works mainly on paper or board, drawn to the resistance the support gives back. She builds layers of acrylic, then sands, scrapes and scratches through them so that one color surfaces from the one beneath. Her wider practice also draws on printmaking, photographic xerography, beeswax and tar, and she works in a studio set in a retired wine cellar in Monterey, California.

Lesley Anne Spowart grew up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and earned a B.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before graduate study at UC Davis, UC Riverside and Cal State Fullerton, where she studied museum practice and exhibition design. As a student she helped install works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Beatrice Wood and Viola Frey. She lives in Monterey, California, where she and her husband raised three children.

A self-described colorist, she works in beeswax, tar, photographic xerography, acrylic and collage, painting abstractions, landscapes and animals in a studio set in a retired wine cellar. She has exhibited widely on the Monterey Peninsula and nationally, including at the Monterey Museum of Art, and her work is held in collections including Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital. She was voted Best Local Artist by the Monterey County Weekly in 2010. See less