Mary Ann Leff, born in Pittsburgh, PA, remembers drawing on the cardboard backs that came with her father’s laundered shirts, making collages with the small squares of his business’ receipts, the thrill she felt with the gift of her first set of Prisma Colored Pencils, and, most memorably, the week she spent painting her bedroom ceiling a bold orange and white paisley design while her parents were out of town. Taking the bus to the Carnegie Museum, she could wander the quiet marble-floored halls, draw in the great room with the dinosaur bones and in the small one with the insects. It was there that she saw her first major museum show, and while everyone else was dazzled by Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” she was mesmerized by his “Potato Eaters.”

 

Saturday mornings, summers, and then undergraduate school at Carnegie Mellon, her personal identity as an artist developed. Despite the blatant sexism of that era, parental messages to stay small and conform and a boyfriend who wanted to control her every move, she found inspiration in the uninhibited expressiveness of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchel and Elaine de Kooning. She was strongly influenced by renowned Professor Robert Lepper and his two-semester studio class, “Individual and Social Analysis” that focused on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression. He encouraged her to develop this through abstraction; and just as she was learning that “the personal is political,” she also began to understand how the personal was valid as source material.

 

These threads continue to influence her to this day and have recently become clearer as she is beginning to think that all the work she produces is autobiographical.

 

Living and working in Berkeley, CA, her work has been shown nationally and internationally, in one person, group, and juried shows. She is thrilled to be one of the newest admitted Member Artists in Gallery Route One.