Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Lesley
Hi Lauren, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Art has always been my outlet, a way to process emotions in response to the world around me. Growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, I was surrounded by educators—family members who would bring home reams of printer paper for me to draw on. As a child, I was a rule follower and did my best to please my parents and teachers, but the times that I do remember getting into trouble were for using household surfaces as an alternative when I had depleted the stack, most notably a colored pencil duck on the baseboard of my sister’s room, a pink tic tac toe board on my bedroom carpet, and the infamous permanent marker scribbles my aunt’s computer keyboard (for which I still feel apologetic). For as long as I can remember, drawing was a need, and my obsession with making and processing quickly became central to my identity. I spent hours drawing every day, often fixated on specific subjects, such as rats and celebrities.
Art became even more critical to me when, at the age of nine, my world shifted almost overnight. I went from being a whimsical, overachieving child to a socially withdrawn one, riddled with anxiety and depression. This period marked the beginning of my experience with childhood onset Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a diagnosis that profoundly influenced my artistic practice. During this time, I turned to art as a refuge, often compulsively waking early to draw before school and continuing through the night and into the early hours of the morning after completing my homework. I became obsessed with creating realism drawings, particularly of Emma Watson, producing over sixty portraits of her in various mediums within just 2 years. Drawing became my way of imposing order and focus amidst the chaos in my mind.
When I started taking art lessons with Bruce Bunch, a watercolor artist known for his paintings of fish, my understanding of art as not only a technical practice but also as a form of therapy deepened. He introduced me to artists and styles far removed from his own, going out of his way to learn techniques just to teach me. He gave me opportunities to grow as an artist and as a person, drawing me into the art world with patience and kindness. Through my teenage years, I experimented relentlessly with both two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, ranging from colored pencil and oil paint to welding and clay modeling. This period of exploration expanded my understanding of materials and their emotional resonance. Losing Bunch to cancer when I was sixteen remains one of the most difficult experiences of my life, a loss that paused my art-making for many months and still leaves a scar in my personal and artistic journey. Ultimately, I decided to honor his memory by going to college for art at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, a choice that reconnected me to my creative passion and set the course for my career as a professional artist and instructor.
During these early adult years, I created a drawing of my sister in a kiddie pool which reflected my complex emotions through the sensory qualities of water: cold, warm, suffocating, calm, and freeing. Water has since become a recurring motif in my work, encapsulating feelings of repression and release. My junior year of college brought a personal and artistic crisis during which I found myself questioning the purpose of my art, grappling with why I felt such an absurdly deep attachment to seemingly disparate subjects—celebrities, my family, my dogs, and playful subjects like sloths, sharks, comfort foods, and rats. My Fine Arts department head, Joe Fig, suggested that I hang up all of my artwork, creating what I now refer to as “The Everything Wall.” Little did he know, this became a week-long installation of over 600 art pieces that I had made from age 11 to 21. Looking at this collection in chronological order allowed me to trace the common threads in my practice: emotional connection to subjects from which I felt physically or psychologically disconnected. This realization became a turning point, leading me to explore themes of false memory OCD, repressed memories, and psychological themes of gaze and containment.
These themes have carried into my current body of work that I am constructing as an MFA student at Georgia State University. With growing confidence, I increasingly reference OCD more directly. As I prepare for a solo show in 2025, I find myself revisiting older works and unfinished ideas, bringing them into dialogue with the themes I’ve developed in recent years. My practice continues to be shaped by my personal narrative, drawing connections between my past and present, and reflecting the resilience and introspection that art has always afforded me.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My journey to becoming an artist has been a winding road—neither impossibly steep nor entirely smooth. Along the way, I faced obstacles common to many in creative fields: challenging critiques, moments of self-doubt, financial pressures, and the weight of grief. Yet, these hurdles were compounded by my experiences with mental health, particularly OCD, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and depression, which intensified even the most ordinary struggles. Additionally, the stigmas surrounding mental health and OCD stereotypes left me feeling isolated and unwilling to speak of my experience with it. Although I have been making work in reference to the disorder for years, this is the first time that I am in a position where I feel comfortable to talk about it publicly. Despite these struggles, the steadfast support of my family, friends, and instructors, combined with the tools I gained through therapy, gave me a sense of persistence. Every roadblock, while daunting, was met with determination and cleared step by step. These experiences shaped me not only as an artist but also as a person, teaching me resilience and guiding me toward a career where I can channel my patience and passion into meaningful work.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Although I have experience working with a variety of mediums, I am most known for my intricate grayscale realism drawings which reflect on the nature of recollection and address ways in which human emotions and experiences are shaped by subtle imprints of the past and their ability to inform the future. By paying close attention to the rendering of light, detail, and texture, I aim to reinforce the idea that memory is fragile and often pieced together from fragments that are vivid, yet elusive, while exploring my unique interwoven connections between memory, nostalgia, and mental health.
I am most proud of my current series, The Mice and the Marbles, which includes graphite, charcoal, and colored pencil drawings, as well as a sculpture and reflects my attempts to visually articulate the realities of living with OCD. Inspired by a scientific study in which mice compulsively buried marbles as an anxiety response, the series delves into the tension between repetition and chaos, control and disorder. Each piece embodies emotions often associated with OCD—fear, confusion, anticipation, doubt, and relief.
Similarly, Sensory Imprints, a collection of charcoal drawings, reconstructs tactile and emotional encounters from memory, emphasizing the fragility and elusiveness of recollection. By piecing together vivid yet fragmented sensory details, I explore how memory is both preserved and rewritten over time. Another significant body of work, Time Capsules, reflects my fascination with the intimate connections between memory, objects, and time. These small-scale graphite drawings depict personal objects from my childhood, transforming them into symbols of reminiscence and sensory attachment. A plastic toy duck evokes childhood joy, while a rose quartz rock shared with my sister symbolizes enduring familial bonds. These objects, though ordinary, become vessels for extraordinary personal significance, inviting viewers to consider their own “time capsules.”
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I feel that the most important characteristic in my artistic practice is patience. There have been many instances in which I have questioned whether a piece will turn out well and periods of time where I have worried that I am not progressing fast enough in my career. Most of the time when I experience such paralyzing anxiety, acknowledging that pushing forward will allow everything to turn out how it is meant to be is enough to keep me from falling into another period of unproductivity. The more time I put into something, the more proud and connected to it I feel.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.laurenlesleyart.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doodledrawing
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenmlesleyart
