Julie Zener Gallery

Light, color, form.  These elements give the work of photographer Leigh Beisch rare beauty, poetry and warmth.  They are elements that have played a significant role throughout her life, growing up with a poet mom and creative director father.  After her family moved from the sharp shadows of New York City, to foggy London, then to the high key light of Northern California then moving again to the lavender skies of New England, her gift for visual language was shaped by studies in painting and photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She now resides and works in Marin County and San Francisco.

Her ongoing landscape work entitled Bodies of Land reflects her love of color, poetry, light and landscapes. Being drawn to landscapes and the different meanings they have in art history and the inherent connection they have for all humanity, she has endeavored to portray them in an emotional sense.  By breaking away from the traditional large format detailed landscape photograph, her work means to portray landscapes that are Universal. Portraying a mood, or a sense that the viewer has perhaps experienced before.  These are not meant to be photographs of specific locations, but more works of art that draw upon both the painterly traditions of Mark Rothko’s evocative color clouds and the detailed photographic traditions of the landscape photography of Joel Meyerwitz, Richard Misrach and Sugimoto.

Her work endeavors to question the definition of what is a photograph by pushing the medium back to its essence- of light defining space and form but this time with painterly ambiguity. This creates an image that hopefully goes beyond being a one dimensional image and more of an experience, an emotion.