Anne Leith’s plein-air paintings are an exuberant expression of a will to create a greater, organized whole from the chaos of nature. Leith’s mark-making velocity and vibrant colors (often accentuated with silver or gold leaf) race to capture the startling flashes of brilliant light found in the forest. Anne Leith seeks to bend space and time with a vigorous response to the intimacy of the solitary self and its attentive relationship to the vastness of nature.
Anne Leith is a painter of places, both plein-air and imaginary. The landscape is integral to her practice and the personal immersion into a greater whole is her over-arching aesthetic. There is a curious vibrating balance between the recognizable image, its abstraction, and that moment of achieving a beautiful painted surface.
Often incorporating metallic leaf into the rich, gestural, oil-painted surface, Leith creates a dynamic other-worldly dimension. Reflecting color and light, shifting from light to dark the gold or silver metal evokes traditional religious icons as well as a futuristic ever-shifting fourth dimension as rivers appear to flow and clouds to rise and unfurl.
This balance between the outer and inner worlds and the passion channeled through the powerful, gestural brushwork dissolves any separation between the self and the world.
Leith spends her time painting nature and places, both in the plain air tradition and in the studio. With an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Contemporary Art History, she credits other artists as her teachers and inspiration. Leith is a professor of art in several colleges and art centers in the Philadelphia area and creates video documentaries and oral histories.
Anne Leith has extensive experience as an artist, videographer, director, art historian and painter. As a painter, Leith has exhibited extensively in the Philadelphia metropolitan region and most recently at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock,NY. Anne Leith's artwork has been featured in the magazine Philadelphia Stories and her professional experience includes Manager of International Projects at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and as an International curator for contemporary art at NextMonet.com, an e-commerce art sales company. Leith was Sotheby’s Institute scholarship intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy and is currently a Member of ArtTable, Inc., an organization of women professionals in the arts. Anne Leith earned her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts from Mills College, Oakland CA, a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Art History from Sotheby’s Institute in London and the University of Manchester, England
