About

Lesley McRae is a painter whose work bridges abstraction and naturalistic landscape.

McRae began her career as an architect and interior designer completing her studies at Princeton University and Parsons School of Design. In her early professional life she learned about line, proportion, and color. Her intermittent painting studies began with portraiture and plein air excursions which shaped her understanding of form and color mixing from life.

Now drawing influence from artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, she explores the interaction between nuances of color, light, and spatial perception pulling from all of her past experience and training. Recently, her practice has expanded in scale and complexity, incorporating improvisational techniques, layering, and mixed media. Her recent paintings center on an intuitive connection to the inner spirit and the natural world, using gesture and color to evoke response rather than depict specific scenes.