Celeste of the West Print

Leslie Singer attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and studied at Georgetown University, then stopped painting to pursue a public relations career. When the man who was to become her husband asked her what her favorite painting is (Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring), it launched an ongoing conversation about art that led her back to palette and brush and resuming her studies at New York’s Art Students League and the Scottsdale Artists School. As a figurative painter, Leslie approaches each work as a study of light and shadow upon which she builds, embellishes, and then erases. Faces and features are often turned away or obscured in some manner. In this way, the viewer can complete the painting using his or her imagination. Heavily influenced by the worlds of design and fashion, Leslie has drawn inspiration from New York City, her home for many years and, more recently, from the Southwest, where she now lives and works. Artists who share Leslie’s passion for the figure and have influenced her work range from nineteenth and early twentieth-century masters such as John Singer Sargent and Tamara de Lempicka to contemporary painters such as Michael Carson and Malcolm Liepke. Like theirs, her canvases depict highly stylized portraits that privilege mood and feeling over realistic representation. Leslie’s work has appeared in galleries across the U.S., and her painting “Katya” was recently selected as the cover of acclaimed writer Daisy Alpert Florin’s novel My Last Innocent Year. Leslie’s works are owned by collectors in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.