Leslie Reid (artist)

In recent years, a retrospective titled Leslie Reid: A Darkening Vision, curated by Diana Nemiroff was held at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa (2011). Also in 2012, her paintings were exhibited in Builders: The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2016, she made a three-week Arctic tour as part of the Canadian Forces Artists Program which resulted in an exhibition titled Mapping a Cold War, a multimedia production of paintings, videos and photo-mosaics at the Founders' Gallery, Military Museums, Calgary which the curator of the show, Lindsey Sharman, called "subtle, yet ambitious and sublime". In 2017, she joined the Canada 150 C3 expedition as artist through the Northwest Passage and on this trip made videos recording two Inuit women, one a young former Ranger and the other an Elder who had been part of the High Arctic Relocation. These videos were shown in Open Channels, Âjagemô Gallery, Canada Council 2019 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2020. (Reid's videos are available on her website). In 2020, she received a Canada Council for the Arts, Concept to Realization Grant for Dark Ice, an exhibition postponed till 2022, in collaboration with Robert Kautuk, an Inuk photographer from the community of Clyde River, which will take place at the Ottawa Art Gallery, curated by Rebecca Basciano. Dark Ice will examine effects of vanishing ice on geographies and communities in the Arctic. In 2018, Reid took part in the artists and writers residency The Arctic Circle, sailing for two weeks on a tall ship through the Norwegian arctic territory of Svalbard. In 2021, Reid exhibited three installations in the 2021 Bonavista Biennale: The Tonic of Wildness.

Her work has since been collected by numerous institutions in Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Glenbow Museum, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Whyte Museum, the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at the University of California (Davis), and many more. In 1978, Reid was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, which gave her the Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts in 2000. She is represented by the Galerie St-Laurent + Hill, Ottawa and Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montreal.

Reid began making her colour field silkscreen prints and sprayed paintings in 1972. In 1976, her paintings were included in the landmark exhibition, Some Canadian Women Artists at the National Gallery of Canada which celebrated the first International Women’s Year. In 1977, she represented Canada at the Paris Biennale. Since then, she has had an active exhibition history with many solo exhibitions (see Major solo exhibitions) and group shows from coast to coast and internationally, especially of her prints, in the UK, the USA, Poland, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Japan, among others. In 1978, the four large canvases purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, were installed by the curator of contemporary art, Pierre Théberge. In 1979, she had a Canada Council for the Arts studio in the Cité internationale des arts, Paris.

In 1972, she began teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa where she also served as Chair. She is now Professor Emerita. She lives in Ottawa.

On her return to Canada, she examined the visual and sensory experience of light and space in her early, abstract prints and paintings, only gradually allowing figurative images in her work. In the early 1970s, Reid exhibited at Carleton University’s Canadian Printmakers’ Showcase, as well as at other Canadian and international venues. Reid evokes the "perceptual and psychological sensations caused by the experience of a particular place" using sites both familiar and less familiar both in Canada and abroad. She uses painting techniques, refined over time, which have involved her early abstract fields of many layers of sprayed acrylic; projection of photographs of places meaningful to her (Calumet Island, PQ, home of her maternal grandmother, was a favourite) on canvas, using stencil and airbrush to arrive at multilayered work, as well as using cold wax medium for its translucent quality. She often chooses subjects in landscape paintings in which "people can place themselves", seeking an effect of stillness. Since 2013, she has been traveling to the Canadian and Norwegian Arctic regions, and used the emotions provoked by aerial views of glaciers, mountains, rivers – and climate change - to create new work but as before, work kindled by the experience of a particular place. Due to her study of aerial views, she finds that the "air between aircraft and earth has become a palpable space of sensation". Many of Reid's works reference locations in the Ottawa and Gatineau Valleys. She also may use different media to recreate her scenes of landscape and light, and to record the effects of climate change, such as the receding ice of the Arctic. She titles her ongoing overall project, Mapping Time, and it has led to several exhibitions.

Born in Ottawa, Reid was part of a military family that moved frequently. She earned a BA degree in political science and art history from Queen's University in 1968. After graduation, she moved to London, England and proceeded to study painting and printmaking at various institutions, including the Byam Shaw School of Art (1968-1970) for her Certificate in Art and Design, the Chelsea School of Art and Design (1970-1971) where she received the H. Diploma A., and the Slade School of Fine Art (1976-1977) at which she took a postgraduate course in Printmaking. While in London, she saw the Tate Gallery 1970 exhibition of Three Artists from Los Angeles (Robert Irwin among them) and, along with the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and other artists such as John Constable, wanted to distill what she had seen.

Leslie Reid RCA (born 1947) is a Canadian painter and printmaker from Ottawa, Ontario, known for adding a visual and sensory experience of light to the landscape tradition of painting in Canada. She is also an educator.