Melanie Wade Leslie, M.F.A.

Associate Professor in Art, Houston Baptist University, Houston, Texas  

B.F.A. - 1973 - Painting Concentration,
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas
M.F.A. - 1994 -  Studio Concentration,
University of Houston, Houston, Texas

Biographical Sketch:

Melanie Wade Leslie discovered printmaking in college in 1971 and was forever intrigued with the endless possibilities of translating images into fine print format.  In the printing lab she was able to explore the traditional processes of relief, intaglio, collagraphy, lithography and serigraphy as a college art major, never realizing the impact that this fundamental background would ultimately have on her professional oeuvre. Her later employment with a newspaper strengthened her ties to the printmaking process.   

"I learned printmaking from a purely fine art perspective, not fully grasping that in the Renaissance, the printing process, though utilizing print artists, had been conceived as a commercial technological advance in the private sector.  When I got to the newspaper and saw the printing process on such a monumental scale, I was awed.  I began learning all I could about the commercial process of offset lithography as well, though my heart has always been moved and inspired by the various techniques  of fine art printmaking.

"The difference, of course, is that commercial printing is driven by efficiency and mass production, whereas the fine art printmaker is concerned with the aesthetics of an image and the journey of the process, even if each print is pulled painstakingly by hand and never even editioned.

"Over the past ten years, my work has been continually evolving from those printed images and elements. I may work with a single image in many different ways before I have exhausted my store of ideas about it. I may work on an image in watercolor and pastel, but my mind is always thinking about how that particular image would work as a woodcut or a collagraph."