Leigh Gusterson Portfolio

“For me, the experience of painting outdoors is wild, exciting, mysterious, joyfull, peacefull, sensual, meditative, even religious, complete with prayer.  All my paintings get started out on location, and each one is a personal adventure.  Often the pursuit of a painting entails dragging my French easel over hill and dale, across rivers, or up some cliff.  Once the “spot” is chosen, I settle into a meditative space where I paint intensely and quickly, but also I daydream, visualize listen to the birds, process emotions, watch lizards, cry, feel the wind, fantasize, take off my shoes, wiggle my toes in the dirt.  Originally from Oakland, New Jersey, I feel infinitely blessed to be living and painting in Taos, New Mexico and to be raising here my two lovely daughters, Azalea and Joelle”. - Leigh Gusterson

Excerpt from: SouthwestArt, March, 2003
It's a wonder New Jersey kept Leigh Gusterson as long as it did.  She was there just long enough, it seems, to get fired up about art while the student of a remarkable high school art teacher.  Then Gusterson hopped on a mountain bike and peddled west.  Later she returned briefly to her home state to take a stab at conventional living.  But a self-described "free wild spirit" needed a free, wild land.  In 1990 Gusterson headed west again, this time with a 2-year-old daughter in a VW van, and ended up in Taos, NM.  The artist was enraptured and initially overwhelmed by a landscape that bore no resemblance to the hazy, almost monochromatic East Coast world she'd known. Her first painting in response to New Mexico depicted a bright yellow cottonwood and was title "Glorious Tree".  “It was so colorful I had to put it in a closet -- it was scary, such a brash, outspoken painting from shy, timid little me," she remembers, laughing. In fact, it was her true spirit coming out.  Soon her painting style was in sync with the aliveness of northern New Mexico's mountains, villages, storms and sky. Today Gusterson starts every painting on location. "It's joyful," she proclaims. "All that color, and the brush strokes not covered up--I get my whole arm going. It's fresh, it's breathing the air, it's not noodled over, it's wild, it's like, yee-haw!"

This year, an image of Leigh’s was chosen for the 2003 Taos Fall Arts Festival poster.  It is of the painting, "Another Day in El Valle”.