Lesley Clarke is an acrylic, encaustic, and collage artist. She has been painting for many years and has a studio at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria. Many of her acrylic abstract landscapes are inspired by the Highlands of Scotland. Lesley was born and raised near Glasgow and visits her family yearly traveling to the Highlands to capture the colours, light, mountains, rivers, rain, rugged terrain that show up in her work. She often embeds found objects (rusted metal, nails, paper) that help create a sense of history, age, and surprise to her work.
More recently Lesley has been working on an encaustic series. The ‘ paint’ is beeswax, mixed with damar resin and pigment. The natural damar resin gives the wax strength and durability. Beeswax encaustic painting dates back 2000 years ago to ancient Greeks. The Fayum tomb portraits from the Roman Egyptian period testify to the archival durability of this encaustic material. The word encaustic means ‘ to burn in’. Each layer of wax needs to be fused to the layer beneath. Lesley fuses each layer using a propane torch.
Most of Lesley’s work is inspired by nature in one or more of her forms.