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. Disenchanted by the political turmoil during the Vietnam Era of the late 1960s, William left university studies and travelled by sailboat 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 and art director in advertising. The artist is now living in the northern San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1979 he has shown his artwork at galleries throughout the United States and in 1996 William Leidenthal's paintings were included in a survey exhibition of Landscape Artists in Southern California at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. 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.

"Landscape Painting historically portrays cultural perceptions about the natural world and a society's relationship to that reality. My art expresses a concern for the modern environment under assault by human population. The work's content is in sympathy with Taoist ideas about the spirituality of Nature. My paintings are a translation of the physical world's complex cycles of change and human interaction with those phenomena. In creating these images I search for unique painting conventions and personal landscape iconography... oh, sorry, they teach you to write like that in art school. Basically, I simply consider the idea of inventing a place, a substitute for nature, but all I have is paint, canvas, lumber, etc., so I just make a Paint World. I have always marveled at our ability (even compulsion) to see concrete images in natural abstract patterns; those 'animals in clouds/faces in tree trunks' moments. My work is most satisfying when it exists in this ambiguous area between the abstraction of materials and a representative image of the world. It is a tension that can provoke the viewer's participation in the artwork and consideration for our perceptions of nature."

–William Leidenthal