Lesley Frenz is an emerging artist working in acrylics and watercolors. Born and raised in coastal North Florida, she received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of North Florida where she studied Art History and Painting. After working in several creative industries, Frenz married and left Florida in 2011 to travel the West and Northwest with her husband. While traveling, she wrote a successful art blog and began freelance work on behalf of galleries and artists, but never stopped painting. Years of travel and living among such incredible beauty spilled out and in January 2013 as she pursued a serious studio practice while continuing to travel. An avid hiker and backpacker, Frenz finds inspiration in wild places and her studio practice is centered around the exploration of the intersectionality between the spiritual and earthbound in the form of abstracted landscape paintings. Hanging up their traveling shoes, Frenz and her husband have found home in Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town nestled in the Skagit Valley between the North Cascade mountains and the Salish Sea. Her work can be found in various private collections in the US, Canada, and the EU. Artist Statement: Growing up in North Florida and years of travel through the West and Northwest have filled my inspiration cup full to overflowing. As I walk miles of wilderness trails, I find myself enraptured with the way the fog settles between mountains, how the light finds its way through the tallest of Redwoods, the kiss of sun glistening on coastal waters. It is these moments that capture my heart and my imagination and move me to put paint to canvas. I carry them with me in photographs and memory until I am ready to allow them to spill forth in color. Through acrylic paintings on canvas and panel, I am seeking to capture the feeling not just of a place, but of a moment. From that inspirational scene, I begin my composition, building up layer upon layer of acrylic color and transparent glazes, until the surface is transformed into a representation of my experience of that locale and moment in time. The surfaces convey the sense of atmosphere and mystery I find in these wild and untamed places, mirroring the wildness in us all.