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Written by Daniel Kany

The paintings of Emily Leonard display a never-ending hunt for spaces and timelessness. "From a process perspective," she explains, "I am always looking for a place that hints of both past memory and future awareness." In other words, Leonard sees memory as a launching point of the past but for the future: without the future component, memory is lost. By focusing on memory, Leonard concedes her deep commitment to finding beauty in truth rather than in creating new and convenient fictions. Leonard's goal of her paintings is to "define beauty as something very honest." It is through her respect for people that she has decided to eschew any brazen moral content and seek the deeply experiential. She offers places where people can be alone with themselves. Any apparent commitment to the image of isolation is quickly redirected by its unusual intensity of appeal. As subjects, her dusk and dawn are entry points to dreams or their silky exits. Her view of nature is heroic and lush.

Emily Leonard's paintings transcend any singular goal; they present themselves with an unusual clarity and apparent depth. They are at once landscapes and contemporary paintings. While traditional landscapes tend to act like photographs or the view from a window, a fundamental strategy of contemporary (and Modernist) paintings is a keen and conscious awareness of the viewer's body. Modernist paintings try to act like they are paintings (rather than hiding the fact) and make the viewer consciously aware of the viewing experience. In some ways, it is easier to see Emily Leonard's work as contemporary painting. Rather than a literal depiction of a specific place, her focus is on the experience of the viewer. Like the cubists, she bends in from the corners, and in doing so exposes the numerous layers of her work. This is a curious strategy on her part since Leonard's technique is to glaze layer on layer of oil paint. It is essentially the same method of Van Eyck or Rembrandt. It is time-consuming and requires foresight, patience and skill. The idea is that light will travel through the multiple layers of largely transparent paint to produce not only color but translucency. It is not as simple as solid color on the surface of the painting. The effects are luminescent and subtle. And yet, Leonard lets the viewer see the process through her clear mark-making. She is a virtuoso with the brush and the energy of her rhythms divulges an intense passion for the activity of painting.

Leonard's paintings are not process-driven. They reveal the planning and focused execution of a mature artist. Her paintings can take a month or more and during this time she needs to be conscious of where she is in the process (for the entire surface) and what her next steps need to be. Her works are testament that she possesses patience rare for an artist her age. To undertake one of her large canvases must be daunting and to finish one must be exhausting. In the end, though, Leonard's paintings are not about her process or her achievement. They respect the viewer by acknowledging her/him and presenting an object of extraordinary craftsmanship. The varnished surfaces and visible layering make it clear the artist has undertaken a serious project. Her skill with the brush never descends into mere academic rendering or showy bravado. Her atmospheric sensibility, as well, fluidly transcends the literal. But rather than a literary intellectualism, her paintings are clearly poetic. They offer a sort of thoughtful dreaminess. Along with their sheer beauty, this is one of their most appealing qualities: placed on the stage of skill, effort and craftsmanship, they are the place of intelligent imagination.