Leslie Reid

Leslie Reid (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.

Early years 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.

In 1972, she began teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa where she also served as Chair. on canvas, using stencil and airbrush to arrive at multilayered work, as well as using cold wax medium for its translucent quality.

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. She titles her ongoing overall project, Mapping Time, and it has led to several exhibitions. 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 1979, she had a Canada Council for the Arts studio in the Cité internationale des arts, Paris. 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. In 2024, Reid showed her New Arctic paintings, alongside Evergon's recent photographs at Galerie St-Laurent + Hill, Ottawa.

Selected collections, memberships and awards 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. Arts Court, Ottawa (today the Ottawa Art Gallery) 1990 Arts Court Gallery (Ottawa); 1991 Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California (Davis); 1991 Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, Porter College, University of California, Santa Cruz; 1991 Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, California; 1992 Fine Arts Center, Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia; 1994 Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario; 1996 Surfacing, Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, curated by Sandra Dyck; 2011 Leslie Reid: A Darkening Vision, retrospective exhibition Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, curated by Diana Nemiroff;

Notable awards 1970: Canadian Centennial Scholarship, U.K. 2011

Personal life Reid's eyes were damaged at birth and later, as an adult she had a traumatic fall which prevented her from painting for five years.