Ann Lehman

The mystery and beauty of the natural world are what I try to portray in my art. How I express that is very much influenced by some of the art I’ve studied and love – Chinese landscape painting, Japanese prints and screen paintings, art of the European modern era, Italian Medieval and Renaissance painting. For many years I’ve created paintings in egg tempera, one of the oldest painting mediums, but challenge myself to use egg tempera in innovative ways. My other medium is drawing, primarily in graphite. The range of grays to blacks, the texture, the line of a simple pencil on paper is so compelling. In both my painting and drawing there is always a dance between image and technique; between the natural images and the line, texture, color and shapes that define them.

Ann Lehman has been making art since her childhood in Pennsylvania. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in psychology and many classes in art history and studio art. Her study since that time has included Chinese ink painting and woodblock printmaking in Taiwan; traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking in Japan; drawing, etching and watercolor in St. Louis, Missouri; and egg tempera painting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since her first exhibition in 1975, Ann has exhibited her work in numerous one-person and group shows. In addition, Ann taught art in Tokyo, Japan and at various places in St. Louis, Missouri, including five years at the St. Louis Art Museum. For more than 35 years she and her husband owned an ethnographic art gallery and traveled to many far-flung parts of the world. These experiences have both added to her understanding of art from a cultural and historic perspective and inspired many art works. In 1988 Ann Lehman first visited the American Southwest and has continued to paint and draw the images she collects from the sky and land there. In 2001 after moving home and business to Santa Fe, Ann changed from painting large watercolors to work in the medium of egg tempera and began a series of graphite drawings of rock formations, plants and animals of the Southwest. Inspired by her many years studying Asian art, she tries to combine this design sense and technique with the mediums of egg tempera and graphite drawing in unique ways.

2-D, Drawing, Painting (all materials)