Lesley Weston

I am captivated by the act of mark-making, a process that bridges my inner dialogue with the external world.

My preferred mediums — encaustic painting and collage, silverpoint, pen and ink, and brush-applied ink and digital “painting” — allow me to explore the layered nature of human experience.

I often incorporate prints of my previous works into new encaustic compositions, blending fragments of my artistic past with wax-friendly mediums to create complex, textured layers. This cyclical process of reworking and integrating echoes the ever-shifting interplay between memory and the present moment.

At the heart of my practice lies a fascination with people and the relationships they form — both with one another and with the environments, natural or constructed, that surround them.

The poignant expressionism of European art between the World Wars, the raw emotion of abstract expressionism, the precision of early Renaissance portraiture and photographic works of all kinds inspire me.

Like those influences, my work seeks to capture the tension between the individual and the collective, the natural and the constructed environments, the personal and the universal.

Creation, for me, is often intuitive. I rarely approach a piece with a fixed idea. Instead, I begin by applying swaths of color on an unprimed substrate or by scraping away sections of a previous work, retaining fragments, and layering sketches or found elements to build a foundation.

From there, I engage in a dynamic dialogue with the materials, responding to their unpredictability and allowing the piece to evolve organically.

I believe art should provoke contemplation. My goal is not to prescribe meaning but to evoke an emotional resonance that invites viewers to linger and reflect. My work, like all art, is a kind of self-portrait — a reflection of my personal journey and identity. Through it, I engage in an ongoing conversation with myself and with the world, continually seeking to understand and interpret the relationships and reactions that define the human experience.