“Her work is complex, exhilarating, visually exciting, and intellectually challenging.”

ROBERT WOLTERSTOFF, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

Leslie Parke is a New York-based painter whose work explores the shifting nature of perception. Built through layered color, reflection, and gesture, her paintings change with the light, their surroundings, and the viewer’s movement.

Parke's paintings are worked until the surface vibrates with an energetic field that reflects and refracts light, at times appearing like "the Aurora Borealis in a Zip-lock bag."

Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, Parke has moved fluidly between representation and abstraction. Influenced by the Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, she has developed a distinctive form of abstraction rooted in observation, where light, surface, and perception remain central.

A recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Grant for Individual Support, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest grant as artist-in-residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, and the George Sugarman Foundation Grant, among others, Parke has exhibited at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of the Southwest, the Fernbank Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Bennington Museum, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires.

Her work is held in museum, private, and corporate collections and includes large-scale commissions for architectural spaces.

She lives and works in Cambridge, New York, between the southern Adirondacks and the Hudson Valley.

A woman sitting on a stool in an art studio surrounded by various paintings and art supplies.

RESUME

Art gallery with bust sculptures on white pedestals, abstract paintings on white walls, and soft gallery lighting.