Leah Conway - October 2023

Artist statement/bio: Beauty and decay, lightness, darkness, lightness, images etched onto the insides of eyelids, glimpses of a dream, a waking nightmare, a lucid memory, the smog of nostalgia clouding reality. My own world. I am present as I am. I hold the balance.

I work in mixed media, primarily utilizing drawing and painting to create moody atmospheric portraits of feelings, inklings and tendencies. Much of my work is figurative though not always in a literal sense. Everything is a portrait. Everything holds energy, has a history, makes some kind of impact on the beholder, be it profound, or mundane; my goal is to draw one's attention. I create a path of connections from the subject to a place that only exists in each individual's memory. That destination is unique to each of us, the starting point only vaguely similar as we gaze into the same captured likeness, flat, hanging on the wall, a portal to another space in time.

Leah Conway has been a maker of art from the time of her arrival on this planet. She began studying drawing and painting at the age of 9 under the tutelage of her grandmother, Ellie Conway, a midwest painter who loved to paint portraits of her family and life on the farm. Leah now signs her work "L. Conway" in honor of her late grandmother who's artist's mark appears as "E. Conway".

L. Conway earned her Bachelor's in Fine Art from UW Whitewater and has since shown her work around the US and aspires to take part in an artist residency over seas. L. Conway's next body of work is a conceptual collaboration with husband, Blair Clark with a projected unveiling in the summer of 2024.