Hello, I'm Lesley Walton.

Lesley Walton is a Twin Cities, MN artist who enjoys creating both paintings and graphite pencil drawings. Her focus in her paintings is of nostalgia revisited... as a child, and still as an adult getting lost in old black and white films and old photos for hours. The nostalgia theme started with a body of work in her Graduation Yearbook Series that was inspired by old yearbook photos, which are brought to life with colors that form personalities and bring them out of their mundane black and white worlds. That concept grew into many paintings reinvented from photos that might still be lying in the bottom of drawers. In 2024 Lesley took a bag of vintage magazines as inspiration pieces and considered doing paper collage but wanted to incorporate the images into painting. She decided to use the process of transferring images from magazines using acrylic gel medium. Once the gel is layered and dry on the magazine image the paper backing is removed leaving a gel transparency. The gels can then be incorporated into other media. Most of the images are black and white so she can bring bold layers of color to them. Some are color images that are transferred but the colors fade and require hand coloring as well. These mixed media artworks merges with the artist's affection for nostalgia with vintage advertisements. Creating fun pop-art style paintings using transfer images including food and fashion trends transform not only the images, but the messaging. 98% of the finished pieces are framed using reclaimed frames. The focus of her pencil work is to explore the art of the human face through innovative portraiture. Her portraits take on a very spiritual feel as she approaches each subject to not only produce a technically accurate rendition-but to evoke life and emotion by deriving the inner spirit from each subject she draws. Her choice to use graphite pencils instead of color for creating portraits is to create a depth with the warmth of the graphite that pulls each viewer in. Lesley is a native of Dayton, Ohio who moved to the Twin Cities in 2011. Lesly studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has exhibited in Ohio, as well as in the Twin Cities including Art-A-Whirl and the St. Paul Art Crawl. Her work has won numerous awards and has been featured in various publications including MN Women's Press. Lesley also has two portraits that were part of the Persistence Exhibition October 2020, at the Ramsey County Historical Society and are included in their permanent collection.