Born 1957
New York, New York
Landscape, 1994
pencil, watercolor, casein, wax, and graphite on paper;
23 × 7.5 inches
(click image for larger view)
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Before she entered Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Leslie Gill studied painting at its School of Art. Since her graduation in 1982, and throughout a career that has established her as one of the nation's most acclaimed young architects, she has never lost her roots as a painter. She records her moments of inspiration in her handbound notebooks, which are filled with watercolors, drawings, collages, photographs and notes. She further refines her ideas through her beautifully ethereal paintings, developing them into the intellectual and aesthetic protocols necessary for the hard realities of architectural form.
Gill's fusion of art and architecture lends her projects a handcrafted, organic sensibility in which painting is not always below the surface, but at times an intrinsic part of the architectural plan. A well-known example is the office suite of Electra Entertainment, a project designed while a partner at Bausman & Gill Associates. Unique fresco panels were executed by the two partners, along with two artists and a crew of students from Cooper Union, to function not merely as decoration but as workstation dividers, moveable partitions and doors.
Now in solo practice, Gill's work has been featured in books, catalogs and exhibitions, including In the Architect's Dream: Houses for the Next Millennium (1993) at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Art by Architects (1992) at the Edith Caldwell Gallery, San Francisco; Architects and Artifacts (1991) at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Pittsburgh; The London Project (1989) at Artist's Space, New York; Bearings (1989) at Parsons School of Design, New York; and Adam's House in Paradise (1985) at the Storefront for Arts and Architecture, New York. She has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Yale and McGill Universities and at Parsons School of Design.
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