Winston Wächter Fine Art Seattle is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Emily Leonard. The first series of paintings directly inspired by Leonard’s experience in New Mexico, where she has lived for the last five years, Understory explores not only the distant vistas and mesas of the high desert, but the ground itself, encumbered with wildflowers and grasses. Leonard’s compositions have historically centered abstracted flora— flurried petals brimming with color— yet here they more directly engage the earth, as one might glimpse passing patches off a trail on an evening saunter.

Indeed, Leonard’s vibrant impressions of the world literally at her feet stem from an early pandemic ritual of taking long walks, photographing the sandy browns and glimmers of red in the flora and desert earth. Oftentimes sharing these photos through her Instagram stories, Leonard began critically engaging with our fleeting attention, comparing the wandering eye scanning a landscape to our shared digital impressions. The sun-stained paintings in Understory all use the same proportions that mimic smart phone cameras, complicating notions of the actual act of seeing. Leonard invites the viewer into her spectral, momentarily captured records of the world below her, teeming with life and beauty, quietly growing into focus.

Emily Leonard is a Nashville native who also works in New Mexico. She received her BFA from Furman University. Leonard has been published in magazines and catalogues including Garden and Gun, Southern Living and Studio Visit by Open Studios Press. Her paintings are included in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Tennessee State Museum, the Nashville Courthouse, Swedish Hospital in Seattle, and UBS, Nashville.