Lesley Anne Spowart "Canine Triptych Ii" Acrylic Collage on Board, Dog Painting in Red and Yellow, Carmel California Art, Statement Artwork, 2024

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A blue dog's head, scratched with fine fan-shaped lines and set with a small yellow eye, emerges from a field … Read more A blue dog's head, scratched with fine fan-shaped lines and set with a small yellow eye, emerges from a field of vermilion and lemon yellow. A rectangle of pale pink paper lies across its neck like a collar, and slim strips of patterned paper are pressed into the surface at the right and lower left. A pink arc curves overhead, and thin dark lines cross the red as if the dog were caught in a net or a diagram. Spowart sands, scrapes and layers, and the collaged pieces here sit flush within thick acrylic, so paper and paint read as one heavy, tactile skin.

Bold in color and small in scale, it brings energy to a pale wall without taking much space. Try it above a sideboard in dark wood, beside a window in a sunlit kitchen, or in a reading corner with deep green or teal upholstery. The yellow warms white and gray rooms, and the red picks up brick, terracotta and leather.

Acrylic collage on board, 12 x 12 x 1 in (30.5 x 30.5 x 2.5 cm). Unframed.

Lesley Anne Spowart combines acrylic paint with collaged paper on board, pressing pieces into the wet surface and working over them until paper and paint read as one skin. She sands, scrapes and scratches back through the layers, and her wider practice draws on printmaking, photographic xerography, beeswax and tar. She works in a Monterey studio housed in a retired wine cellar.

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