Spotlight Artist: Jenny Leonard

In travel and in painting Jenny Leonard searches for a world within a world.

Leonard's work is derived from experiences backpacking and the sense of physical and emotional dislocation in strange, foreign places. She is interested in the picturesque and the tourist ideal, the way the world is framed in a photograph and the need to explore, capture and conquer. In the aftermath of travel she discovers a space to contemplate these anonymous landscapes in a placeless world through painting.

Leonard indulges in the formations of simple landscape compositions, exploring the marks she craves in the picture and the sights she pursues in travel. The paintings emerge as a kind of fantasy idyllic backdrop with the familiar among the abstract, where inventive forms compete with existing objects.

Morphing the terrain as she paints, overly saturated colours and gestural marks capture the essence of the form rather than its appearance. Instant brushstrokes leave the end result at the mercy of the materials. Leonard pushes and pulls the brush across a white washed surface and allow the foreign yet familiar place surface.

During the intuitive process of painting, absurdities surface in the picture, reducing the complex scenery to simple, comprehendible forms in a simple brushstroke - resulting in a generic and universally understood landscape, however peculiar.

This exercise becomes the final stage and reflection of her travels.

See what happened at Jenny's Saturday Debut here

http://www.debutcontemporary.com/jenny-leonard-the-work/

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