Lesley Hanlin creates expressive compositions shaped by movement, relationships, layering and suggestion. Her work explores how forms interact, overlap and shift, often occupying the space between abstraction and recognition.

Drawing on her design training and formal education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she brings a practiced sensitivity to composition, negative space and the relationship between figure and ground.

Nature often provides a starting point—a wing, the movement of water, an animal, a botanical form or an unexpected pattern—but recognition is not necessarily the destination. Through shifting edges, open space and intuitive mark-making, forms emerge, recede and sometimes dissolve into one another.

Lesley lives and works in Northeast Florida, where observations from nature, interiors and daily life continually find their way into the studio. Her work is guided by curiosity and restraint—what to reveal, what to obscure and when to allow a painting to remain unresolved.