About the Artist

Hello!

Welcome to Swirleeee.com, an online portal into Swirl World.

My name is Leora, and I identify as a Swirl Artist.

This page is all about me and my path to becoming a Swirl Artist.

I am a Califronia native, born and raised in Los Angeles. As far as art goes, I was enrolled in painting classes as a child, where I learned to draw and paint with charcoal, pastels, watercolors and oils. I attended a special High School for the Arts, where I spent 3 hours a day exploring visual arts. After high school, I attended MICA, the Maryland College Institute for the Arts in Baltimore, MA for one semester.

By the time I reached Art University, I felt burnt out from the art classroom environment, and felt eager to explore the world that lay beyond the four walls of school. During my first semester of university, I found a job house painting. Climbing up and down ladders, stretching long and wide to cover large walls, and learning to work with new tools appealed to my restless spirit and curious young mind.

After completing one semester of school, I decided to leave, return to California, and start a new life in San Francisco. I signed up for two courses at the SF Circus Center to pursue my fascination with juggling and other forms of performing arts. The theater teacher at the Circus Center needed help producing paper mache masks for a play, and within a week of moving to SF, I had my hands covered in glue and paint.

I continued working for the teacher, and after the mask project, the focus changed to building maintenance in an aging Victorian building in San Francisco. Starting with house painting, I soon learned plaster and carpentry work. I loved learning how homes are built and what goes on behind the scenes of the walls we live within. I became acquainted with power tools, and my hands were happily busy learning to work with new materials . Although this was not the traditional way to pursue an art education, all the new skills I was learning contributed to my overall education of how the world works, which I felt would ultimately enhance my artistic path.

I continued learning and working in building maintenance. I worked for a house painting company, and free lanced as a house painter all over the bay area. I apprenticed with a master carpenter for nine months, renovating a Victorian apartment. I learned how to build and install windows, doors and floors. I spent hours cutting in, perfecting the skill of painting straight lines. I also dove into the world of masonry, and transformed an enormous pile of bricks from an old foundation of a home into a charming brick path down a steep hillside in San Francisco.

The artist in me was patiently learning a variety of skills and problem solving techniques that I never would have encountered within the formal art education environment. Blue collar work, or working in the trades taught me the value of long, hard work days. Jobs always came with a time and money constraints, and work needed to get done efficiently and effectively.

I was doing some house painting for a director of a nursery school. He asked me to paint the name of the school on his van, and as I started painting the letters, I couldn’t help but spruce it up with a decorative flourish. My inner artist jumped at the chance to apply all the skills I gained in working in the trades to create something not just functional, but beautiful as well. My painting muscles that had spent hundreds of hours painting straight lines finally got a chance to curve and swerve. I started with a squiggly line, which led to more squiggly lines, which led to more and more colors vibrating and dancing with each other.

I started to explore the visual effects of undulating lines of color, as I continued to paint more vans and walls of the nursery school. I noticed how colors and shapes interact with each other , and approached each painting as an exploration of energy, creating a vibrating, visual dance. I discovered a new love for creating art on a large scale. My house painting days gave me an understanding of how to control the materials and cover large spaces. My artistic sensibilities inspired me to create dynamic, stimulating visual experiences to bring joy and pleasure to the viewer.