Leesa Gray-Pitt is a member of the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory
Leesa Gray-Pitt is a figurative artist who writes when the grief is too overwhelming to paint and paints when she can’t find the words, pouring her emotions onto the canvas. Art has been her therapy and catharsis through the living nightmare of child loss, painting and writing her journey through trauma to find the spiritual feminine.
Drawing portraits since her teens, Leesa decided to follow her passion for art and fashion and use real faces as her canvas, winning Hair and Makeup Artist of the Year 2003. Having worked on many famous faces and in fashion, television and bridal, she started painting faces on canvas in 2016 to deal with the death of her beautiful daughter Star Dawn.
Some highlights of Leesa’s career are an artist residency at Chateau Orquaveaux, France, in 2019. Living at the chateau for four weeks with artists from around the world was a dream come true and an experience she will never forget. Leesa has also just returned from Quarantine – an artist mentorship program in Menorca, Spain. Chosen along with other high calibre artist from across the globe she accepted this challenge wholeheartedly, returning with a new found focus and drive.
Obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2021, Leesa pushed the boundaries of her practice exploring different techniques and mediums. Inspired by fashion, mythology, and the occult, Leesa purposely sources materials such as textiles, fashion magazines and photographs to explore how society measures gender, ideas of power and notions of beauty. Similarly, she uses text as a reminder of how the spoken word can propel change for future generations.
Her current body of work employs layering and destruction to create portraits that explore the complexity of the feminine identity. Addressing body image, identity and feminism, she portrays women not as victims of marketability, morality or politics but with a found strength and agency. She purposely source materials such as textiles, fashion magazines and photographs to explore how society measures gender, ideas of power and notions of beauty.
Often adorning her paintings with flowers, butterflies, gold leaf, and gems, symbolic of the fraught relationship women have to beauty, innocence, protection and patriarchy. Importantly Leesa uses them as separate components that may stand on their own or to an idea of interconnectedness, overlapping identities and intersectionality. Her objective being to arrange them to form a harmonious artwork that links all of these elements together.
In particular, focusing on intersectionality, of the need to consider both the individual and shared experiences of women in contemporary society. Although her works represent a diversity of women, they are essentially a cathartic expression of her own psychological and physical journey through time.
Contemporary society can only rectify gender power imbalances by accepting that we are, in fact, multi-faceted beings with diverse traits (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, colour, age, social, physical and mental ability). Furthermore, that feminism is not exclusive but instead should, and is, actively embracing those that identify as femme regardless. Leesa’s work is an emotional reaction to her personal experience. In other words, it is a cathartic way for her to deal with the psychological aspects of her journey from one of innocence, painful experience to feminism.
Leesa Gray-Pitt aims to empower the intersectional feminine identity by painting women who inspire, adorning them with gems, butterflies and flowers, symbolic of the fraught relationship women have to beauty, innocence, protection and patriarchy. “Importantly I use them as separate components that may stand on their own or to an idea of interconnectedness, overlapping identities and intersectionality. My objective being to arrange them to form a harmonious artwork that links all of these elements together.”
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