We are the Story: A Painting Exhibition by Leigh Witherell

Leigh Witherell (b. 1969; Denver City, Texas, US)

Photographer and award-winning painter Leigh Witherell lives and works in Brevard County, Florida, near Orlando and Cape Canaveral.

Although Leigh’s education in the arts did not begin until college, she began to immerse herself in the fantasy world of literature as a child. Her escape into a wide variety of literary works that included the worlds of King Arthur, Beowulf, and others helped fuel the imaginings of a child and led to a love of creating. The combination of those interests later led her to obtain a BA in English with a minor in Fine Arts and eventually a Master’s in Literature from the Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio.

In 2018, Leigh and her husband relocated to Florida, where they found the perfect home with a studio for her creative work.

Her understanding of art-making as a powerful therapeutic tool informs her artistic practice. She specializes in abstract and fluid art, as these techniques allow her visions to transform themselves through interaction and reaction. For Leigh, this process mirrors grief, a central experience in her life following the loss of her daughter Amanda in a tragic automobile accident in April 2021.

Shortly before Amanda’s death, she had encouraged Leigh to launch her career as an artist and had identified fluid art as a mother-daughter project that would serve those purposes. Leigh decided to proceed with learning this new technique and began showing her fluid art soon after. It wasn’t long until her evolution took her away from fluid art and into her passion, melancholic abstract figurative and landscape art. This technique certainly shows the depth of feelings and range of emotions that are now part of her everyday life. Through these images, she can convey how her life has been affected and is evolving daily.