The Paintings of Leslie Ann Butler

richard Speer, art critic

Pensées du Noir …

Portland, Oregon-based painter, LeslieAnn Butler is a contemporary Renaissance Woman who has enjoyed success as an author, actress, fashion model, and award-winning advertising executive—but it is as an artist that she has found her most powerful voice. In her chromatically sophisticated, texturally rich paintings, Butler chronicles the intrigues and inner lives of the contemporary beau monde: the psychological complexities that underlie the gaiety of her glamorous vignettes.

From an early age, Butler was inculcated into the idea as art as a passport to realms of exoticism and romance. Her great-grandmother, Ardella Nelson Butler, was an artist, as was her father, Marlow Butler, whose visual travelogues of Venetian lagoons and antebellum mansions spurred her own aesthetic curiosity as a young person. During a peripatetic childhood she moved frequently and lived for awhile in the country among horses, dogs, cats, birds, turtles, and a veritable menagerie of domesticated and wild creatures, which often wound up the subjects of her art. In high school she excelled in art classes and continued these studies—along with writing and theater courses—at the university level, first at Lewis & Clark College, then at the University of Oregon. A career in advertising beckoned, however, and while she earned much acclaim in the field, her heart belonged to the visual arts. Eventually, in the 1990s, she returned to the life of a painter and has not looked back since.

—Richard Speer, contributing critic at ARTnews, Art Ltd., and GLASS Quarterly, and contributor to Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, and Salon