We began this Fight in the Museum column five years ago by interviewing artist Leni Paquet-Morante. Her work is more highly sought over now, and her style has expanded and blossomed.
Karl Kusserow, Senior Curator of American Art at Princeton University Art Museum, is organizing an exhibition for Morante in 2025. His observations are: “Leni’s work brings that most familiar and often most traditional artistic genre, landscape representation, in compelling new directions. Rooted in close observation of nature, her work moves beyond its literal reproduction to become something else: layered, complex, often abstracted evocations of diverse environments, which repay careful study by revealing something at once personal and broadly essential about our place in the world.”
Do you think your art has changed in the last 5 years?
My work five years ago was primarily making representational landscape paintings outdoors and that led to my interest in shallow water systems as muse. I made hundreds of plein-air works, experimented in the studio, and developed confidence with painting. I was as interested in drawing storm drains as tide pools, and in working small as much as large. I’ve pursued a more interpretive landscape recently, to the point that I rarely worked outside in 2024. My practice now includes painting on canvas and paper, monoprints, ink drawing, and sculpture, for an interpretation of landscape and water systems.
What are you representing with your images?
I’m interested in the notion of landscape, where an intuitive combination of images come together like pieces of a dream or memory. I like to think of the work as an opportunity to think of landscape as one would still life, or language, with parts that can be rearranged, have new scale relationships, new hierarchies. And, importantly, I’m interested in the work presenting evidence of its formation process.
Are people drawn to the colors or shapes? Or both?
What I’ve found is that the folks who are drawn to my work like its complexity, they enjoy the little journey that happens when something they don’t recognize at first becomes clear with a little time. I think what they’re drawn to is that visual engagement, like letting your eye and mind wander within a busy fish aquarium.
Some of your work borders on non-representational. Do viewers feel drawn to that?
I’ve seen people stop dead in their tracks when they see my work, and others dismiss it immediately. It’s all representational to an extent, just through my filter; some get it some don’t. What’s fun is watching when someone challenges themselves to understand it, and then when the light goes on and their smile follows.
Do you paint on site (en plein air) or in the studio, or a combination?
I do both, and sometimes, literally a combination in one piece. In the last two years I’ve done mostly studio work that explores a layering approach and negative space as object. I still make paintings of the lotus pond at Grounds For Sculpture because it provides an ever changing chaos of color and form which is really fun to work with; those paintings sell quickly and have been the core of my income this year. At the easel by the pond, I’ve become used to being asked if I’m real.
You show your work at art fairs yourself. How satisfying is it meeting the collectors first hand?
I’ve been fortunate to find success selling my work, and I’m grateful for an expanding collector base. It is hard work doing the outdoor festival gig and yet I have lots of different kinds of conversations.
It’s been as rewarding helping a new collector choose a small drawing as it is to sell a large painting; and just as engaging to listen and respond to a struggling young artist with questions as it is to hear a musician explain what they see my work.
What fight or struggle do you currently have regarding your art?
I always say that if I’m not a little confused then I’m not working hard enough! Right now, I’m figuring out how to make a painting that builds on a series of small ink works that I made in 2023 and am using some new materials in that quest. I’m not really interested in making loads of work that looks alike so my moving forward often results in work that looks different from the last. I see it as all the same though, as with enough time and hindsight even a meandering path seems straight.
How do you decide between painting on canvas, paper or making prints and drawings?
I move between materials for the opportunity to understand things differently. A brushed paint line on a canvas is a different thing entirely than a thin ink line on paper; each has a different personality and that can affect all notions of form making. I switch things up regularly to keep on my toes.
What do you have coming up? What are you looking forward to?
I’ve been tapped by a university museum for a solo exhibition in 2025. The curators are in the early stages of choosing work for that, and I’m eager to see their presentation and to engage with a wider community though their programming. Outside of that, I’m looking forward to seeing what will emerge on the enormous roll of Arches Hot Press paper that I just purchased!
Instagram: @lenimakespaintings.
Studio: Johnson Atelier Studio Program, Studio 16, Motor Exhibit Building at Grounds for Sculpture. By appointment. Contact via Instagram or email moranteartsllc@yahoo.com.
Artist Leni Paquet-Morante at Vermont Studio Center.,
