Leigh Toldi
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Throughout my life I have been surrounded by and fascinated with art and artists. This includes visual art, theater art, musical art, and the art of the verbal intellect. Very early on I realized I was born with stage fright, sang like a chicken, and had an embarrassing knack for verbally massacring the English language. Luckily I found I could draw a straight line, and I avidly turned my young mind towards the visual arts.
It didn't take me long to discover that drawing straight lines was a rather dull prospect and that scribbling outside the box was a much more interesting course of action. I have been traveling, exploring, observing, grumbling, a-hah-ing with line, color, form/formlessness, ever since.
I am now more than 30 years into my explorations, and have consistently centered my drawings and paintings around a fascination with the human experience. Additional symbolic references include biology, world history, the animal kingdom, and the physical terrain of the California Central Coast (I'm a native Californian). My work comes in many shapes and forms, tiny to very large, sometimes bold and often extremely subtle. My recent paintings and drawings have been described as complex, multi-layered, full of hidden dimensions, beautifully dark but still hopeful. I am pleased with these comments, because this is how I find the world I am attempting to portray.
