Pears in Reflection
Pewter with Pomegranates
Eggplant Rosa Bianca
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“My impetus is to create exquisitely rendered, dynamic paintings that wake us up to the miracles of everyday life,” says Leah Kristin Dahlgren, a classical realist. “When light from one apple in a bowl bounces into the next apple’s shadow and becomes luminous color inside the shadow, that’s what I call the miracle of light.”
Leah Kristin has been an artist since the age of three when her mother taught her to draw full figures. “Eleven was a good year” she says, “my family gave me a set of oil paints for Christmas, and I was recognized as gifted by the Detroit Public Schools.” She was sent to The Detroit Institute of Art in her teens. Dahlgen drew, painted and worked in pastels throughout her college career, and her adult life in Hawaii. But it was after she moved to New Hampshire, turned forty, and took a course in classical painting, that she found her passion and “my life’s work took off.”
Dalhgren has been a member of the Three Squared Artist Group in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and has shown her work at Newton Open Studios. As well as painting and teaching Classical Art in her New Hampshire studio, Leah Kristin works on commission. She creates still lives, portraiture, museum copies, and liturgical paintings.
Artist Statement
With neither word nor concept to express or identify my reality at the time, I awoke to being an artist at the age of three. I’d been shown how to draw the figure and innocently found my life’s work in that experience. The rest has been my journey and the unfolding of it.
My artistic expression, mainly in drawing and pastel, advanced slowly but steadily while remaining dreamy and imaginative. Moving to New Hampshire from Colorado in 1988, I felt it imperative to find a painting teacher. Working with Numael Pulido for a year, I learned classical painting in oils, copying works of the Old Masters. In 1991 I began to trust my own judgment and face the challenges of painting in my own way. Devoting myself rigorously over the next six years, I was often called “obsessed with painting” by friends who understood my passion. In 1997 I became a student of watercolorist Leszek Forczek of Santa Rosa, California. I was fascinated by the luminosity of his work and discovered there were aspects of watercolor technique that I could carry over into my work with oils.
My journey has been a process of transforming a passion for color, light and what I can only call composition into expression. When referring to the word color, I’m speaking of a whole reality of interactions and interrelationships, including subtleties and brilliance. In speaking of light, I refer to brightness from a realm of white or golden illumination that transitions, curves or fades, usually over form, into transparent shadows that become darkness. The word composition speaks of the fine tuning between form and space, harmony and discord, tension and serenity – of charged placement.
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