Leslie Parke’s paintings feature complex layers of color and gesture that are worked until the surface vibrates with an energetic field that reflects and refracts light…. an Aurora Borealis in a zip-lock bag. Parke has spent her decades-long career exploring the artistic possibilities that exist between the worlds of representation and abstraction. Light, transparency, and reflection are themes that dominate her work. Her paintings of everyday objects such as plastic water bottles and her more abstract compositions of lines and colored thread both play with the viewer’s ability to perceive pattern and meaning in a visually dense field. Her explorations of shape, light, and the relationship between abstraction and perception all developed following the influence of the great American postwar painters, such as the Color Field artists Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Parke received her BA and MA from Bennington College. She is a recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Grant for Individual Support, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grant as artist- in-residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, and the George Sugarman Foundation Grant, among others. She lives in Cambridge, New York, and ELLIO Fine Art represents her in Texas.