“The sun plays a key role in my new work. Each painting, in its own way, portrays a moment in the landscape when the sun spotlights, highlights, or even obscures the scene.”
Denver-based artist Lelija Roy offers glimpses into the western landscape. Roy’s mixed-media work expresses texture as color and color as texture. She works with acrylic paints and a long list of other water-based media pigments. Her textures combine various rice papers, lace, silk, fibers, handmade paper and metals with acrylic mediums. The painting process includes mono-printing, watermarks and numerous painting techniques. Resulting pieces can include as many as twenty layers. Each piece expresses unique rhythms and textures of the living earth. She seeks out the interconnectedness of organic and inorganic elements. These glimpses encompass: the hazy light of early morning, the wind in an aspen grove, the silent struggle of a pinion pine on a canyon wall or the rush of the waterfall.
Roy offers landscapes: observed, remembered and imagined. Her current work speaks to Lelija’s intense need to be one with the natural world and to celebrate the beauty of earth’s biodiversity. Her creative process is essentially terra-forming. Her multi-layered canvases start with earth, water and sky. Later she grows rocks and trees and plants.
As an only child, Roy reflects: “My best friends were a box of crayons. My spirit poured on to countless pieces of paper.” Roy’s formal art training began in the 1970s at the Art Students League in New York City and a BFA was earned from the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her early career in graphic design morphed into publishing, educational research and teaching. Roy’s work is held in both public and private collections throughout the U.S. and in several foreign countries.
Roy offers landscapes: observed, remembered and imagined. Her current work speaks to Lelija’s intense need to be one with the natural world and to celebrate the beauty of earth’s biodiversity. Her creative process is essentially terra-forming. Her multi-layered canvases start with earth, water and sky. Later she grows rocks and trees and plants.
As an only child, Roy reflects: “My best friends were a box of crayons. My spirit poured on to countless pieces of paper.” Roy’s formal art training began in the 1970s at the Art Students League in New York City and a BFA was earned from the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her early career in graphic design morphed into publishing, educational research and teaching. Roy’s work is held in both public and private collections throughout the U.S. and in several foreign countries.