Perspectives: Flight Risk

Although she started as a painter, earning an MFA in Printmaking from LSU, Alexandria artist Leslie Elliottsmith has focused almost entirely on digital collages in recent years. “I kind of stopped painting when my parents died two weeks apart,” she observed. “Using a computer so much for my job [she was director of Online Learning for the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts], I found it easier to be creative with digital photography.” Digital collage, she explained, allows her to consider each photographic image as a piece of a larger composition, not as a whole work of art in its own right. “It’s the same additive process as painting and printmaking,” she said, “… a process of layering images upon images upon images. I even layer colors in thin veils of transparency, so I can manipulate the final image even more.”

For years, with her digital collages Elliottsmith has explored themes of renewal, the implacability of Nature, and the impact of man’s hand on the Louisiana landscape—a message that she feels becomes more urgent with every passing day. “I’m letting my political observations come out now,” she says of the new works, which make the artist’s stance on issues such immigration, women’s empowerment, climate change, and efforts to undermine environmental regulations very plain. Her work bristles with allegorical symbolism: birds represent the fragility of natural systems; nests connote security, regeneration, and sense of place; water serves as a cleansing agent, washing away the bad and serving as a highway of change. “Being that I grew up in an area under sea level, where water was held back by levees, it is only fitting that I refer back to water often.” 

Paintings, prints, and works in digital collage by Leslie Elliottsmith are available through LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, and through the artist’s website, artelliottsmith.com. This month, Leslie Elliottsmith will be profiled on LPB’s “Art Rocks,” the weekly showcase of Louisiana’s visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, November 10, at 8:30 pm, or Saturday, November 11, at 5:30 pm, across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.