Tag Archives: Exhibits

Exhibiting at NMSU’s Art Gallery

Breathing Lessons 1-5Selections from the Permanent Collection at The University Art Gallery, NM State University, Las Cruces will include my 5 piece blue painting installation, Breathing Lessons. These pieces are painted on paper adhered to wood frames that recede to the wall. The installation creates wonderful shadow effects that become part of the piece. The University purchased this when it was part of the 2-person exhibit Visceral Whispers featuring the work of Betty Hahn and myself in 2005.

This exhibit will be open July 2 – August 3. An opening reception will be held July 5th from 5-7pm.

Breathing Lessons is part of my ongoing Blue Series that began in 2001 with my residency at Crater Lake, OR the deepest bluest lake in the US. Being immersed in the beauty of this lake gave me an appreciation for the healing possibilities of the color blue. Blue has many associations for people but calmness, nature and wellness are very prevalent. My excavation of blue lead me to think about other colors and how they influence our lives thus began other series of work focusing on color.

Tag Archives: Exhibits

SHADES Exhibits

Insights 27 (left), an oil on wood painting from my reductive SHADES series will be showing in the wonderful group exhibit, Sea and Sky at the Liz Afif Gallery in Philadelphia from June 6-June 28.

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Other work including Lost and Found (right) from the SHADES series is now available at Snapp Price Projects Gallery in ABQ! Additional SHADES work can still be seen at Tinney Contemporary, Nashville and at Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston. To view more work from this series please click here.

SHADES was inspired by my silent, still and reverent observation of either the changing sea or sky around me. While in artist residencies by Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea or in Finland’s Arctic Circle I resisted intelligence and was present in the natural world, learning about it up close, right here, right now. This softened the imaginary line between nature and me. The resulting paintings also softened becoming reductive sensory memories capturing my feelings rather than the details.

The sheer wonder of the world around me without the interfering static of everyday noise influenced my work helping me to sense the day’s moods and nuances that would have been missed in a usual day’s ‘attention blink’. Tapping into this undercurrent of knowledge is what my art is about. I use these elements to express my own visceral responses to life and to evoke those of the viewer.

My life has taken a deliberate turn in the last decade—more focused—intrigued by empty space, interested in the air between the notes. Working in my home studio suits my need for the contemplative solitude my paintings require. Paradoxically I am also a traveler with much curiosity about the world. Exposure to unfamiliar places challenges my perceptions, expands my ideas and ultimately informs my life and my work.

Finland’s weather of fog, mist, rain and cloud masses can all occur in a summer’s 24 hour lit day. The northern sky’s light is infused with a translucent clearness that made me feel as though I could step into and through any barrier into the universe itself. Looking from my Finnish studio window I saw the sky’s wondrous shades of lemony yellow and pinks when the sun winked.

Italy’s southern coast in contrast has vibrancy and high drama. The days were pregnant with every blue color value and the nights were black velvet. The sea’s beauty could be both tumultuous and soft as cashmere fascinating me from my studio or walking in the complimentary sands.

I dipped my brush into my soul and painted what cannot be said verbally. I used the glazes in the paintings for the pure translucency of the skies, the gradations for the subtle nuances of color that shifted continuously and the bold contrasts and marks for nature’s spontaneous surprises. The sensuous spirit of my travels returned home with me in my work and in my heart.

Tag Archives: Exhibits

Intimate Visions at Leich Lathrop Gallery

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Intimate Visions will exhibit at Leich Lathrop Gallery May 2 – June 5 with an opening reception on Sunday, May 5 at 3-5pm. The exhibition will feature works on paper by myself, Deborah Gavel, and Joyce Shupe, including pieces from my Chimes, Luminers, and Limnings series. To view the works on paper section of my portfolio click here.

Scroll down to view images of my installation from the show.

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Tag Archives: Exhibits

Ode to Curators

Jeanne Brasile, Director of Seton Hall University’s Walsh Gallery, and I had been in dialogue about my art over a couple of years and how to present my work in an exhibition. The process of watching her assimilate my work and paring down all the facets of my output (paintings, sculptures, work on paper, et al.) to a cohesive concept was observing the mastery of a curator’s skill. As a result she luckily became the curator of my exhibition “Earthly Pleasures” showing at the Walsh Gallery until April 5, 2013 (pictured below).

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It is a wonderful thing for me to witness a curator design an exhibit of my work that executes their vision. Just less than a year ago Jeanne commented that the exhibit she envisioned would revolve around my travels and observations of the natural worlds I experienced, using the colors they presented as was nurtured by my Grandmother many years earlier. Brasile familiarized herself with my oeuvre so that it became possible for her to choose the work that supported her idea, writing the names of the pieces on the gallery’s blueprint with the installation designs she envisioned. This she confidently did by email.

And the exhibit was executed exactly as Jeanne conceived it six months before receiving the work in hand. The clarity with which she visualized her intentions and the superb fulfillment of those intentions fill me with admiration, awe and so much respect for Jeanne and for curators. It is a delight for me to walk into the gallery and recognize a “story” told so well with my art and the curator’s understanding of my issues. Thanks Jeanne Brasile!

I think you will gain an understanding of Jeanne’s curatorial process if you read Jeanne’s statement below, accompanied by photographs of the exhibit “Earthly Pleasures” by David Vogel:

27Marietta Patricia Leis’ lush, saturated color field paintings function as fenestrations into an unconfined world of natural forms. The oil paintings are, in part, evocative of landscapes, seascapes, plant forms, weather patterns or micro-organisms and can be concomitantly seen as many of these phenomena. Nuances of color and light palpably depict a range of imagery that encapsulates a life of experience, serving as complex memory portraits that tap into emotions and feelings. For Leis, the paintings are meditations on specific places and times in her life.

The earliest of these memories date to the time she spent with her maternal grandmother, Ermelinda Fiore. Ermelinda’s world was one of scents and colors, a lasting impression on Leis’ young mind. Leis recalls accompanying her grandmother to the garden, spending hours listening to her as she described the flowers and their various attributes. Making their way back to the house, they would then arrange the flowers into bouquets, an art form in her grandmother’s home. The kitchen was similarly filled with indulgences of taste, smell and creativity. Cooking was also a form of creative expression for her grandmother and provided another realm of aromas and colors amid a backdrop of floral arrangements from the garden.

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Leis’ more recent influences are derived from her extensive travels, one of the most seminal being a trip to Italy in 1979. There she tapped deeper into her Italian heritage and absorbed a new range of 48colors and influences. After an artist residency in Crater Lake, Oregon, Leis’ painting took on new resonance. She began to travel more widely to such exotic locations as Thailand, Greece, the Antarctic, Finland, Spain and Portugal. Having experienced a variety of locales, each with their own particular light and color conditions, her paintings took on the task of expressing the bounty of nature and its variety of nuances.

The multiplicity of blue shades encompassed in the sky and water became one of her favorite muses. This can be seen most clearly in works like Barrier Rift I & II, Breathless 1-6, and QuietnessDepictions of atmospheric conditions are expressed in Pixels, which indicate a variety of tones and colors as well as the formless structures of fog and light. But Leis’ work always draws upon her early years back in New Jersey with her grandmother. The Seed paintings offer us a variety of green, brown and golden hues culled from her “nonna’s” garden. The sheer variety of colors, light conditions, hues, tones and saturations attributed to Leis’ work reveals an artist that is concerned with looking at, meditating on, luxuriating in the bounty of nature and all its endless permutations. In Earthly Pleasures we enter a world that Leis constructs for us from memory. It is the absence of a very specific, figurative language that leaves us with occasion to assemble memories borne of our own experiences. Leis’ ability to reference her own past and present, while bridging that of her audience makes her painting resonate so profoundly. In every work we sense the artist’s gratitude and awe in the bounty of nature and we, too, can feel it intensely.

– Jeanne Brasile, Curator

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Tag Archives: Exhibits

Earthly Pleasures at Seton Hall University

pixel-installEarthly Pleasures, a solo exhibition of my work curated by Jeanne Brasile, will be shown at the Walsh Gallery, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ. The exhibit will run from March 11th-April 5th with an opening reception on March 14th,  from 5-8pm. It will encompass work of the last 12 years that reflects my impressions of the many places I have traveled. There will be approximately 57 pieces shown including paintings from the Blue Series, Green Series, and Pixels, as well as works on paper and some sculptures.

Being a native daughter of East Orange, NJ, I grew up close to the University where there was an enclave of Italian-Americans, one being my grandmother, Ermelinda Napoliello. She was an enormous influence on my sense of beauty, aesthetics and especially of color.  I would work by her side in her garden of adundant colors. The use of color in my work reflects this early exposure and drew Brasile to my work.

Peter Frank, art critic of the Huffington Post, has written an essay that accompanies the exhibition:

MARIETTA PATRICIA LEIS: GALLERY OF EARTHLY PLEASURES

Vapor_5Marietta Patricia Leis’ markedly minimal artwork – and minimalist sensibility – belies, but at the same time subtly conveys, its richness of source. However self-referential Leis’ emphatically reductive paintings, objects, and painted objects may seem, they begin in response to stimuli in the observed world. This in itself does not define, much less explain, their existence; if they act diaristically for Leis, emerging from her travels and her feelings, they do not – and should not – act prosaically for us. Rather, they function as distillations of experience, related to places and sensations inspiring them much as perfumes do to the scent sources comprising them. They are not about Leis’ life, but are conjured from it. They themselves provoke sensation, ineffable and yet profound.

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Tag Archives: Exhibits

Popular Ballad 4 Exhibits Again

Ballad 4 just returned to the studio from exhibiting in the International Tour that went to China, South Korea, and Istanbul. Now it’s been chosen to exhibit at the 28th Annual International  Exhibition at Meadows Gallery, University of Texas at Tyler. The exhibit opens January 8th and will show until February 8th with a reception January 17th. Wade Wilson, the director of galleries in both Santa Fe and Houston, selected Ballad 4 to be in this group exhibition. Ballad 4 is a 15 x 15” oil on canvas painting from my series, Atmospheres. The work was inspired by my artist residency in Scotland at the Cawdor Estate, home of Shakespeare’s MacBeth castle. See Stories 2 below, another painting from the Atmospheres series.

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Tag Archives: Exhibits

Pixels Preview at Gallery Sonja Roesch

You are now able to sample 4 of my current oil on wood paintings in the Shades series called Pixels at Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston.

These are intimate reductive works that can exhibit singularly or in dramatic groupings. Pixels’ wood framing recedes to the wall in a pyramidal shape that makes the paintings seem to float. This creates wonderful mysterious shadows.

Each of the paintings tells a “story of place” capturing the essence of my travel experiences by not allowing the noise of everyday to enter. These are quiet, contemplative works. My use of a limited palette is to convey the predominant colors of an environment. Color conveys the mood of a place and of its people. In their very simplicity the paintings are lush and to be enjoyed.

I hope you have an opportunity to visit Gallery Sonja Roesch!

Tag Archives: Exhibits

Exhibiting in Washington DC

My paintings, Limning 1, 2, and 4 are to be included in a group exhibit entitled Lo Studio dei Nipoti (The Studio of the Grandchildren, Nieces and Nephews) at the Hillyer Art Space at the International Arts and Artists in Washington, DC. September 7th-28th.

The exhibit, curated by Cianne Fragione and Rose Michelle Taverniti, features artists that have family ties to Southern Italy. It evolved from an artist residency of the title’s name that Taverniti initiated to help these artists form a connection to their roots.

Limnings are abstract paintings that reflect my travels on the Southern Coast of Italy by the Tyrrhenian Sea and will exhibit together as a grouping.

More details of the exhibit can be found on the Hillyer Art Space website. I hope you’ll have an opportunity to see the work of these wonderful artists.

Tag Archives: Exhibits

2012 Park Fine Art International Tour Show

Young-Sook Park, Gallery Director at Park Fine Art in Albuquerque, NM, has organized and curated a group exhibit with international artists that will travel to Beijing, Seoul, Istanbul, and conclude in Albuquerque.

I am delighted that my oil painting Ballad 4 will be included in this touring event that enables my work to be shown in far away places. It is always one of my favorite events! 

The tour will open in Beijing September 1st and finishes it’s tour November 16th. More information can be found at http://parkfineart.com/Announcement.aspx.

Tag Archives: Exhibits

GREEN to Exhibit in Idaho Falls

My multimedia exhibit, GREEN: a paradox of abundance and scarcity, will be one part of a two person exhibition at Carr Gallery at Willard Arts Center (Colonial Theater), Idaho Falls. The entire exhibit in the 2000 sf gallery is entitled, Environmental Considerations: New Works by Marietta Patricia Leis and Omar Sarabia, and is being presented by The Idaho Falls Arts Council. The exhibit opens July 14-September 1 with a reception Thursday August 2 starting at 5pm.

The Curator of Exhibitions, Nathan Barnes, selected the two artists represented because they are inspired by specific environments, “The paintings, photographs and sculptures found in Leis’ multimedia installation, Green: a paradox of abundance and scarcity, were developed in response to the flora and fauna she encountered during her artist residency in Northern Thailand. In contrast, Sarabia’s non-objective paintings are developed as a response to his daily surroundings, both domestic and natural, in Pocatello, Idaho.”

 More of my work can be found at www.mariettaleis.com and examples of the GREEN exhibit can be seen on this website at >portfolio>green.