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