When Holliston in Bloom asked her to create an illustration epitomizing the town’s New England roots, artist Laurie Leavitt, a fine painter with plenty of graphic design experience, turned out a watercolor painting that incorporated the Congregational Church and Holliston’s 8-Arch Bridge. As she often does, she worked from photographs to paint icons of the town she’s lived in for 24 years, raising two daughters.
“I’ve always kind of been a painter,” says Leavitt, who has worked in oils and watercolors.
“I enjoy the ability to layer with oils,” says Leavitt, who says she never really took to acrylic. “I started with oils, and you can continue working before it dries. It’s very workable for a longer period of time.”
Leavitt, a graphic artist early in her career who says she always seemed to have a natural ability in art, enjoying it, took a break from painting when she raised her family. What got her back into painting, she says, were profiles she did of her daughters at their soccer games, from series of photographs she took.
“I hadn’t really been doing much artwork through my younger years, so that kind of got me off and running,” says Leavitt, who has since focused on landscapes and natural settings. The artist is inspired by nature and trees. “I’m really intrigued by how the seasons just move along. There’s such stability in nature year after year –the plants come up; the trees come up,” says the painter, who immensely enjoys gardening and “growing things.” Leavitt says she enjoys simply witnessing nature and how it changes with seasons and time, as well as with light.
“Usually it’s the light that makes it so beautiful,” says Leavitt. Just the act of painting, she says, makes her more aware of the changes light brings.
“Once you start painting, you’re super in tuned to those things, early morning light, silhouettes, all the things light does to the landscape that makes it really beautiful. When I see it, I kind of like to capture it.”
Leavitt says she enjoys losing herself in the process of painting.
“Earlier, I’d just kind of be a slave to the photograph, but now I use it more as inspiration and a jumping off point,” says Leavitt. “It doesn’t have to look like the photograph, although my work has always been pretty realistic.”
Leavitt, who got a degree in art from Colby College years ago, recently received her masters degree in education with a concentration in art from Framingham State University. There, she says, she started printmaking, which she found to be a fun medium.
“They’re a tad more abstract,” says Leavitt, who says that painting trees allows her to be more abstract as well. “You can’t paint every leaf, but kind of get the rhythm and movement of the trees.”
Leavitt, who attended the Museum of Fine Arts museum school while at Colby, still shows and sells her work at an annual sale in December at the MFA. She also shows work at the Five Crows in Natick, where she teaches a watercolor class, and has shown her work at the Hopkinton Arts Center, where she taught a children’s class, and the Amazing Things Art Center in Framingham.
This month, for the entire month, Leavitt’s work will be shown at the Ashland Public Library in a show entitled “Limited Editions.”
If you’d like to see more of Laurie’s work, visit her website at Laurieleavitt.com.
Issue Date:
September, 2017
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