Artist Bio

LeeAnn Love, a Tennessee native, has been a visual artist from as young she could hold a pencil. She has dedicated her life to storytelling and meaning making through the visual arts, both in her own paintings and in helping others tell their stories, providing healing and empowerment through art. LeeAnn created Heal with heART, her art therapy private practice in Nashville, as well founded MyCanvas, a mobile youth community art therapy program, serving at-risk youth in the greater Nashville area. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally and has spearheaded several community mural projects in greater Boston and Nashville. Additionally, LeeAnn teaches and supervises new art therapists, to continue to shape and impart knowledge to upcoming arts leaders and therapists. LeeAnn is also a passionate outdoorswoman – an adventurer, a camper, a paddler, and a hiker. She loves exploring the outdoors, using travel, landscape, color, movement, and emotional experience as inspiration for her mixed media paintings.

Artist Statement

In nature, I am fully alive. I feel whole and grounded spending time in the woods, floating on the river, hiking in the mountains, or walking on the beach. I savor the moonlight in the desert while immersed in the stars and relish the expansive sky while embracing vibrant sunrises and sunsets. This is what leads me to paint the natural world. I absorb myself in capturing “the wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit” (John O’Donahue) within the landscape, an expression of a fleeting sentiment, in a transient moment in time. When I paint abstractly, I feel exuberant and free, focused only on the texture, color, and the viscosity of the paint. In this process, I trust my intuition with mark making and color choosing, like the natural ease of the ebb and flow of the ocean rolling onto the sand. When I paint naturalistically, I find myself mindfully present, exploring every rock, leaf, and shadow with detailed care. I integrate my landscapes and abstracts through colorful vibrancy, expressive marks, and representational imagery.

More than documenting an exact replica of the location, I capture the rawness and fleeting impermanence of our ever-changing world. These paintings meld my liveliness and vulnerability with the peaceful serenity of the landscape. In exploring emotive sentiments as much as outer, external environments, I bring the viewer deeply into my paintings by igniting a flash of a memory, a story, or a piece of themselves. I aim to encapsulate the movement and the stillness, the emotional essence and the literal naturalism, the impermanence and the stability. All these paradoxes find themselves inside of one landscape, one artist, one painting, one moment in time.