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William
Leidenthal grew up in Palo Alto, California, attracted to art and nature
at an early age, exploring the California landscape from the beaches of
Santa Cruz to the Sierra Nevada, later exploring creative expression in
the San Francisco music poster scene of the 1960s. In 1969, during the
political turmoil of the Vietnam Era, William left university studies
for a sailing odyssey across the Pacific Ocean from Central America (Costa
Rica and the Galapagos Islands) to French Polynesia (Tahiti and Marquesas
Islands), Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand. Returning to Hawaii in 1978, he
disembarked to devote himself to his art while pursuing a degree at the
University of Hawaii where he received his BA in 1984. William Leidenthal
went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree at East Carolina University
in 1987. Until 2003, William had been living in Los Angeles painting and
working as a graphic designer/art director in advertising. The artist
is now living in the northern San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1979 he has
shown his artwork throughout the United States, including a survey exhibition
of Landscape Artists in Southern California at the Los Angeles Municipal
Gallery in 1996. His work is represented in a number of private, corporate
and institutional collections including The National Institutes of Health
(Washington, DC), Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles) and The City
of Honolulu, Hawaii.
"Historically
'Landscape Painting' has reflected cultural perceptions about the natural
world and a society's relationship to that reality expressed through pictures
of the environment. While my concern for the modern environment under
assault by human populations is an impetus for creating these works, I
have chosen this subject as a symbol of individual perception, endeavoring
to discover a visual representation for our interaction with the natural
world. The universe we assemble through our senses is limited and incomplete,
our concrete experience of "reality" an illusion. My work reflects
on this discrepancy, the distance between what we think we know about
the world and what is actually happening: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness
is Form. Understanding our visual experience is more complex than simply
labeling what we observe objectively or interpret subjectively. What else
is going on here that gives rise to an awareness for what we call the
spiritual quality of Nature?"
William
Leidenthal
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