About Leah Kohlenberg

I was a journalist before I became an artist, at the age of 30. I bought a four-bedroom house, and painted every wall of every room a different color. Someone walked in and asked me "are you an artist?"

It made me wonder. So I started playing around - first with wood on paint, and then quickly I got more serious, and decided painting is what I wanted to do. There were some confusing years there where I wasn't very good and did a lot of part time jobs, but I made sure I painted every day and took a lot of classes. In my mid 30s, I moved to eastern europe for five years to get more of the basics I felt I was missing in the U.S. (specifically, I lived two years in Budapest, Hungary; two years in Yerevan, Armenia; and a year in Zagreb, Croatia). I began to teach art overseas, as well as paint for a living. And now I've been an artist 20 years, twice as long as I was a journalist!

I have always had an affinity for cityscapes, particularly night scenes, and I return to that subject matter a lot. Broken down buildings, in particular, make my heart leap for joy. Perhaps there is something in the broken down that allows something new to be born. But now I love the idea of painting anything: landscapes, seascapes, portraiture, animals, crowd scenes, night scenes, day scenes, bridges. I work impressionistically ... and I am trying to let more of the base, or raw painting, come through to the surface. This is true regardless of medium: oil, acrylic, watercolor, or pastel. I want some of the roughness of the first draft to come through.