Meet Leigh Witherell

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Leigh Witherell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Leigh below.

Leigh, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

My resilience is inherited from my mother and all the women in my family. I am from a long line of poor farm people. My maternal grandparents were very poor, but my grandmother always made the best of what they had. I learned to not focus on what could or should be, but instead to deal with what is there and to make the best of it. This helped me the most both when I gave birth to my children and when I had to bury my 32 year old daughter. I can’t make the most of her death as it has been the most devastating event of my life, but my resilience has helped to get up each morning, get into my studio, and get on with it. It turns out that gift the women in my life bestowed on me has been the most valuable to surviving what is now my life.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I spent part of my adult years raising our children and obtaining my two degrees in Literature and that was a very special time. It was hard and we were young parents, but having that time to be there for them so that they had the opportunity to do all the things kids do was so important to us and we are very happy to have been able to give them that kind of childhood. When they were done with elementary and junior high I started teaching English Literature in a local collage. I really loved it, but art was always there, whispering in my ear to pay it some attention. After our children were out and living their adult lives we moved to Florida and my husband encouraged me to pursue my art. My husband’s income has always been such that I could make decisions that so many women don’t get to make. As an artist that means I have my patron and can focus solely on my art career and I am immensely grateful for that. We have been married for 36 years and we have been each others biggest supporters and best friends.
I am focused on my art as a career which means learning how to run a small business and that has been a learning curve. I think too many artists ignore this aspect thinking that it impedes creativity, but I feel that the more I learn how to be successful in business it frees up my mind to be creative.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I think my curiosity is very designed to be an artist. I have always been curious about people and how we show the myriad of emotions we all have. I try to capture moments in these emotions and tell through my art what I see.
My skill of listening is crucial to my artistic process. I learned how to listen from my mom’s family, who are all story tellers. Any time we are together we will tell stories about our memories and our lives and as a child I would sit and be enthralled listening to these stories. The most valuable part of this skill is that I learned to hear what isn’t being said. It is that space between the words where the real emotions live.
I think my empathy also is very valuable to my practice. I am able to identify with people and the stories they tell and that helps people feel comfortable to let me into their lives. I value the trust people place in me to tell their stories and sometimes to keep their secrets. This is very important to me.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

I work in fine art nudes and that is a surprising challenge right now. My art explores relationships and how they are changing. Those relationships can be with other people or just with ourselves and there are those that believe we should censor this exploration. The United States is dangerously close to fascism and I feel this every time I have to dispute Meta censoring a piece of art I want to post. My work is not shocking and the images are not vulgar, but because they show sexuality, the human form and emotions the platform feels that it is responsible for censoring my images so that children don’t see them and no one is offended. My question becomes why is the platform acting like a parent? When did we as parents stop parenting and monitoring our children? And why is the human form suddenly vulgar? Nudity has been in art since art began. The human body is a beautiful and magnificent creation of the universe and should be celebrated, not censored and we should learn that our emotions shouldn’t be shamed or hidden. I hope that cooler heads prevail and my fears don’t come true. But for now I must argue to get my work seen here in the States and that is a big challenge.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.leighs.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leighsartfl
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leigh-witherell