Leesa is a figurative artist who writes when the grief is too overwhelming to paint and paints when she can’t find the words, pouring her emotions onto the canvas. Art has been her therapy and catharsis through the living nightmare of child loss, painting and writing her journey through trauma to find the spiritual feminine.
Drawing portraits since her teens, Leesa decided to follow her passion for art and fashion and use real faces as her canvas, winning Hair and Makeup Artist of the Year 2003. Having worked on many famous faces and in fashion, television and bridal, she started painting faces on canvas in 2016 to deal with the death of her beautiful daughter Star Dawn.
One of the highlights of Leesa’s career was an artist residency at Chateau Orquaveaux, France, in 2019. Living at the chateau for four weeks with artists from around the world was a dream come true and an experience she will never forget. She was also Vice President for RedWest Creative Co-op, which was extremely rewarding and provided many opportunities to learn skills that will help her career as an artist.
Starting her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2020, Leesa has pushed the boundaries of her practice exploring different techniques and mediums. The growth in her practice shows in her latest pieces. Inspired by fashion, mythology, and the occult, Leesa purposely sources materials such as textiles, fashion magazines and photographs to explore how society measures gender, ideas of power and notions of beauty. Similarly, she uses text as a reminder of how the spoken word can propel change for future generations.
Leesa aims to empower the intersectional feminine identity by painting women who inspire, adorning them with gems, butterflies and flowers, symbolic of the fraught relationship women have to beauty, innocence, protection and patriarchy. “Importantly I use them as separate components that may stand on their own or to an idea of interconnectedness, overlapping identities and intersectionality. My objective being to arrange them to form a harmonious artwork that links all of these elements together.”
Leesa has participated in several group exhibitions, finally having her first solo show in 2021at BlackCat Gallery. Leesa’s intention has always been to capture the likeness of her subjects - Painting faces, either on canvas or in the flesh, will always be a constant source of pleasure and her true passion!