Leslie Reid

Leslie Reid (born 1947) is a Canadian painter and printmaker from Ottawa, Ontario, known for adding a visual and sensory experience of light to the landscape tradition of painting in Canada. She is also an educator. Early years Born in Ottawa, Reid was part of a military family that moved frequently. She earned a BA degree in political science and art history from Queen's University in 1968. After graduation, she moved to London, England and proceeded to study painting and printmaking at various institutions, including the Byam Shaw School of Art (1968-1970) for her Certificate in Art and Design, the Chelsea School of Art and Design (1970-1971) where she received the H. Diploma A., and the Slade School of Fine Art (1976-1977) at which she took a postgraduate course in Printmaking. While in London, she saw the Tate Gallery 1970 exhibition of Three Artists from Los Angeles (Robert Irwin among them) and, along with the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and other artists such as John Constable, wanted to distill what she had seen. In 1972, she began teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa where she also served as Chair. She is now Professor Emerita. She lives in Ottawa. Work On her return to Canada, she examined the visual and sensory experience of light and space in her early, abstract prints and paintings, only gradually allowing figurative images in her work. In the early 1970s, Reid exhibited at Carleton University's Canadian Printmakers' Showcase, as well as at other Canadian and international venues. Reid evokes the "perceptual and psychological sensations caused by the experience of a particular place" using sites both familiar and less familiar both in Canada and abroad. She uses painting techniques, refined over time, which have involved her early abstract fields of many layers of sprayed acrylic; projection of photographs of places meaningful to her (Calumet Island, PQ, home of her maternal grandmother, was a favourite) on canvas, using stencil and airbrush to arrive at multilayered work, as well as using cold wax medium for its translucent quality. She often chooses subjects in landscape paintings in which "people can place themselves", seeking an effect of stillness.