Biography
Leslie Shaw was born and educated in Saskatchewan, attending university in the sixties and receiving a teaching certificate and B.A major in Visual Art. After teaching on the prairies and then in Toronto, she completed two years at the (then) Ontario College of Art before moving to Thunder Bay, Ontario. In 1996 she began attending Lakehead University as a part time student in Fine Arts, receiving an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2003. Her work is largely representational, derived from the photographs she takes of her personal environs, interiors and gardens, and the rural and urban landscape of Northwestern Ontario. Shaw works in acrylics, translating her 4x6 inch photographs into paintings using areas of solid colour in a reductive process and evidencing a sense of space that references both Canadian historical art and her childhood on the prairies.
Artist Statement
In the majority of her paintings, Shaw's main interest is the effective of light and its ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Working from photographs allows her to capture light in the moment of illumination. She rejects a hundred views before she finds one worthy of capturing on film; rejects a hundred photographs before she finds one worthy of capturing on canvas. She is mainly interested in the interaction between man and nature; man attempts to dominate nature in many ways, yet nature over time erodes, weathers and tames man's efforts.
Her series on rock cut rocks shows the result of this contact between man and nature. We pass the ubiquitous rock faces, seldom noticing them, yet man's violent contact reveals the hidden inner beauty and history of the rock in infinite variety of line and colour. The result are paintings in which in many respects are abstract works of art - the subject is reduced to the interaction between line, space, colour and texture.