Leslie Reid

“Photography is a really good source for me because, of course, it is all light. I look for all the patterns. I’m not looking so much for the image as what that patterning does—the tonality, the light and dark”  2011

Leslie Reid’s paintings, serigraphs, lithographs, etchings and drawings of landscapes and people she is close to, show her interest in light and the emotional experience of setting. 

Reid graduated from Queen’s University with a degree in Art History and Political Science and studied drawing, painting and printing at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, England. She studied printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art and in a postgraduate course at the Slade School of Arts, University of London. 

While luminance is central in Reid’s work, she employed various approaches to its depiction. Calumet Island shows Reid’s expansion beyond the canvas in her depiction of the sky’s light at different times of day. Point Lobos I exemplifies her single-hue approach to landscape, using a narrow band of values to provide an ethereal effect. Her paintings in 1990 employed a technique of layering a wax and oil medium on a background to create an image with darkness, as seen in Denny Wood V. Reid was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1977 and she won the RCA jury prize for excellence in Visual Arts in 2000. Reid taught painting and drawing at the University of Ottawa from 1972 until 2007.