06 Sep Artist Spotlights: Leslie Lambert

Among Leslie Lambert’s most vivid childhood memories are trips with her mother from their home in Ashton, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., to the National Gallery of Art. She especially loved looking at the bold, fluidly abstract canvases of America’s Color Field painters of the 1940s and ’50s, including Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko. “I didn’t realize then how much they would influence me,” she says in wonder.

Today, Lambert enjoys widespread recognition for her vivid realist works created using a method that harkens to those mid-century masters: poured watercolor, applied by first drawing her composition on paper, then masking off certain areas with a masking fluid that blocks the paint. She then carefully pours more paint and lets it flow across the surface. The result, typified by such recent compositions as I Think I Shall Never See a Poem as Lovely as a Tree, are faithfully realistic paintings while simultaneously possessing an otherworldly inner glow. “It’s a color shift that you couldn’t catch with just a brush,” she says.

Lambert credits her artistic mother, an elementary school teacher, for introducing her to inspiring artists and encouraging her creativity. “I remember being so proud of a cartoon mouse I drew when I was 4 or 5. I named him Harold,” she laughs, “but he was probably influenced by Mickey Mouse.”

Mountain Everlasting | Poured Watercolor on Panel | 30 x 20 inches | 2023

She also fondly recalls a tent her mother set up in the family room for her and her two sisters and two brothers, where she loved to sit on summer days, “drawing maps of imaginary places.” During 9th grade, while sick at home, she picked up a watercolor set she’d been given for Christmas and began furiously painting birds from National Geographic. “And I was in love.” Back in class, she showed them to her art teacher, who instantly transferred her to the advanced class. “So, I became an artist.”

Lambert continued her devoted practice through her senior year, when her family moved to Utah, and went on to study art at Brigham Young University–Hawaii until a growing interest in scientific illustration led her to earn a degree in marine biology and zoology.

Blazing River | Poured Watercolor on Panel | 20 x 20 inches | 2024

Marriage and parenthood next inspired Lambert to turn her talents toward portraiture and then, after a move to British Columbia, landscape painting. Eventually, she returned to the U.S., now dividing her time between Colville, Washington, and Burley, Idaho, where she teaches art at a branch of the College of Southern Idaho. During those many peregrinations, she eventually found her true aesthetic calling after taking a class from the Chinese-born, American-based master of that medium, Lian Quan Zhen. “I fell in love with what he did, pouring and blowing the paint. And I wanted to master it for myself.”

Lambert is represented by Horizon Fine Art in Jackson, Wyoming; Trails End Gallery in Chewelah, Washington; and Kube Gallery in Langley, British Columbia.

Based in San Rafael, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.