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LesleyRiley.com Artist/Owner

Lesley Riley

Business Info

Sector: Quilting, Paper Crafts, Book Arts, Printmaking, Design, Other
Type of Business: Designer, Teacher, Artist, Other

Bio

Lesley Riley is an internationally known instructor and multi-media artist, working in botanical printing, mixed and digital media, paint and textiles. In 1999 she turned her initial passion for fabric, photos, color and the written word into a dream occupassion that continues to delight and inspire creatives and art lovers everywhere. Lesley has an extensive background in using color and pattern to create innovative art quilts, and most recently, digital modern botanical prints based on her original cyanotypes. Her work is shown and collected world-wide.

Lesley has authored nine books that demonstrate the use of everyday materials – fabric, paper, photographs and text – to create non-traditional art. Her art and articles have appeared in many publications in the US and abroad. She is a former Contributing Editor of Cloth Paper Scissors magazine, and host of the Art & Soul podcast.

In Lesley’s ongoing effort to find the best ways for mixed-media artists to get permanent imagery a variety of surfaces, she introduced Lesley Riley’s TAP Transfer Artist Paper—the state-of-the-art technology for iron-on transfers to fabric and other surfaces. The Craft and Hobby Association named it the CHA Innovation Award Winner in winter 2011. She is a currently a C&T author, a fabric designer with Northcott Fabric, a Golden Paint Artist Educator and a BERNINA Ambassador.

Lesley is a pioneer in taking the 150-year old cyanotype process into the modern digital age, blending the classic and contemporary to create truly unique botanical art. To create her modern botanicals, Lesley combines the cyanotype process with a little water (wet-cyanotype) and leaves gathered from as close as outside her door, to wherever her travels take her, to create carefully composed original cyanotype prints.
These camera-less photographic blueprints become the bones for her subsequent 21st century digital artistry, combining layers of pattern and color culled from her own paintings, artwork and photographs.

Inspiration literally falls at her feet and creativity abounds in an empty nest she shares with her high-school sweetheart husband on a mountaintop in Cascade, MD. You’ll find Lesley in her indoor and outdoor studio from sunup to sundown unless, of course, any of her six children or 16 grandchildren come to visit.