There is a painting in Leslie Brown’s gallery that started with a photograph of herself at twenty-two years old. She printed it on gel — a thin, translucent medium made from acrylic, almost delicate — and then added wings. Cut from the same gel print. Collaged onto a background she built herself. Two griffins flank the image, pulled from a reference she fell in love with at a gallery in New York City. The griffin, she’ll tell you, represents feminine power. A woman. A lion. Something that refuses to be tamed.
This is how Leslie Brown makes art. Layer by layer. Material by material. Meaning by meaning. And if something isn’t working — if the hand is wrong, if the weight is off, if the painting is fighting her — she picks up her brush, says thank you, and keeps going.
“When I was doing giant paintings, I would paint on wood,” she says. “When something bothered me, I’d take an electric sander and just — gone. Then I’d paint it again.” She laughs. “If you get overly involved, if your ego gets in the way, it ruins the painting. You have to let it breathe.”
Temecula City Lifestyle first featured Leslie as part of our Art in Abundance series, celebrating the women artists quietly building something extraordinary in this valley. Returning to her gallery — now rooted in Old Town Temecula, where her ArtLAB fine art classes have become a destination for students — we wanted to know where the journey had taken her since. The answer, it turns out, is deeper in.
“My inspiration as a child was my grandfather,” she says. “He used to say, you can do anything you want. And I’m like — okay. Let me think about that.”
He took her to every museum, every gallery he could find. When she was not yet ten years old, he brought her to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She found herself sitting in front of Salvador Dalí’s crucifixion — that charged, vertiginous perspective — and couldn’t move.
“He came over and said, ‘Boy, babe, you’re gonna look at that one for a long time.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Grandpa — I think I could do this.’ He said, ‘Do what?’ And I said, ‘I think I could paint.’ He said, ‘Let’s get you some paints, then.’”
She was ten years old. He took her out of school in sixth grade and they toured the entire East Coast — every museum, every gallery, up and down the coast. Homeschooling before it had a name. He was still there through college, still writing letters, still asking questions. He died while she was in graduate school.
She has been painting ever since.
Forty years later, Leslie’s work lives in the collections of Marriott International, Kaiser Permanente, Wells Fargo, and the Riverside Art Museum. She is a professor and Gallery Director at Riverside City College, where she has spent decades shaping artists and growing one of the most respected college galleries in Southern California. She has shown in Los Angeles, New York, Santa Fe, and Joshua Tree. She has been published, awarded, and collected.
And yet the work she is most drawn to right now is deeply personal — rooted in memory, in girlhood, in the ache of a generation that dreamed big and watched some of those dreams dissolve.
Her current pieces carry that weight — and somehow also its opposite. There is a series built around Jean Shrimpton, the British model who embodied the mod ideal of the 1960s, printed on transparent paper and laid over preprinted backgrounds, sometimes a mono print she’s made herself, sometimes a paper she found that was simply perfect. The transparency is intentional. Through the scale, through the layers, you can still see the flowers underneath.
Her most recent paintings are three-dimensional — clouds scraped off the palette with a flat blade and glued onto canvas, mirrors embedded in the surface, gold and mica pressed into the layers. She is building paintings you can feel, paintings that catch light differently depending on where you stand.
“I just love putting a lot of things together and seeing what happens,” she says. “Usually, it works. Or I’ll beat it until it works.”
In Old Town Temecula, tucked into a space that feels both like a studio and a sanctuary, Leslie’s ArtLAB offers six-week fine art classes to students who come seeking something they often can’t quite name. What they find, most of the time, is permission.
Permission to make something imperfect. Permission to sand it down and start again. Permission to say thank you to a brushstroke that didn’t work and move forward anyway.
This is what forty years of making art — and four decades of teaching it — looks like when it becomes a place. Not a classroom. Not a gallery. A home for the work, and for the people brave enough to begin.
And Leslie will be the first to tell you that beginning is not always gentle.
“I rarely ever approach a canvas sweetly or kindly,” she says. “Most of my art is intuitive. I don’t go with any preplan. I just start painting.”
She talks about going into the studio angry — really angry — and just painting it out. Slapping the paint around. Throwing it at the canvas. “If it ends up in the painting, it’s there. If it’s not, it’s not.” She laughs.
The going in is the whole thing. Showing up, even angry, even uncertain, even with no plan and no guarantee. That’s what makes an artist.
Her grandfather knew it when she was ten years old, standing in front of a painting she couldn’t walk away from.
She knows it now. And she’s still going in.
Leslie A. Brown is a fine artist, printmaker, and educator based in Temecula, CA. She is a Professor and the Gallery Director of The Quad Art Gallery at Riverside City College and the founder of ArtLAB Fine Art Classes in Old Town Temecula.
Visit her work at www.leslieabrown.com | Instagram: @artlabtemecula