Leigh Witherell: Painting the Spaces Culture Tries to Ignore

In a cultural landscape increasingly defined by speed, spectacle, and surface, Leigh Witherell works with deliberate resistance. Her paintings do not compete for attention, they resist it, slowing the viewer down and redirecting focus toward the subtle, often uncomfortable realities that sit beneath everyday life.

At the core of her practice is a commitment to observing what culture frequently overlooks: quiet exchanges, private tensions, and the fragile negotiations of vulnerability that exist between people. Drawing on a background in literature and shaped by personal experience, Witherell approaches painting not as documentation, but as a form of cultural inquiry. Her figures do not perform, they exist, carrying with them the weight of memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken.

In a time where public discourse is often loud but shallow, her work insists on a different kind of engagement. One that asks the viewer not simply to look, but to confront, to question, and to recognise themselves within the silence.

Your paintings often feel like fragments of private conversations rather than staged compositions. When you begin a work, are you searching for a specific emotion, or do you allow the figures to reveal that emotional narrative as the painting develops?

My paintings all start from a moment in time. I might overhear a conversation, see a transaction between two people or something in the news or social media catches my attention and it becomes a composition after much refining. I don’t start from a specific emotion simply because in my process it tends to stunt the authenticity of the piece. I find it gets in the way of what the figures want to talk about.

There is a striking sense of stillness in your work. Many contemporary artists pursue spectacle, yet your paintings invite the viewer into quieter psychological spaces. What draws you to these intimate moments rather than grander visual statements?

I believe my art is quiet because I value the quiet in my life. I have never been one to seek out the spotlight or to bully people with my loudness. The odd part of this is that I love to laugh and tell stories and that tends to draw attention. But really, I prefer to reflect quietly and academically, and I think that reflects in my work. It’s easy to scream your opinion and force people to listen, but to really make people think or reflect is on another level and I believe that is achieved with quiet. I think that it is in the quiet moments where we can hear our thoughts that we are most able to reflect on what we think and believe. The world is too noisy today and too distracted.

Much of your work explores human vulnerability through the figure. What do you think the human body allows you to communicate that words or abstraction alone cannot?

Vulnerability, we are never more vulnerable than when we are nude and we are exposed to the opinions of the world. As an artist, the human form is a beautiful creation of nature with all its variables, like size, color, shape, the list is endless. In my work I show nudes quite often with a clothed figure to show the exposure we risk as we try to live authentically. I am a woman in the US right now, I feel very vulnerable in that I fear the rights that the women before me fought so hard for, along with the rights of other vulnerable groups, are falling victim to powers we have no control over. I try to show this through my work because that fear is a palpable thing, akin to an elephant in the room and if we don’t confront it in any way we can, we become complicit to the very thing we fear. 

Your background in literature inevitably shapes the way you approach storytelling. Do you see your paintings as visual narratives in the literary sense, or are they closer to emotional poems where meaning remains intentionally open?

I see my paintings as more of an emotional poem. I want the viewer to relate to the work with their own experiences, not mine. The advantage to being quiet in the composition is that it gives the viewer that space to think about how what they are seeing makes them feel, to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs. Will that always be comfortable? No, it won’t. But it will always be necessary if humanity still desires to progress and to think, then we are obligated to be uncomfortable at times since it is only through discomfort that we learn.

Grief and memory have become powerful undercurrents in your practice. As time passes, how has your relationship with these themes evolved within the studio?

Grief is the undercurrent of my life now. I have learned that grief looks different every day, even after 5 years, and I suspect it will look different every day for the rest of my life. Memories play an important role in my practice as I come from a large family of storytellers. I learned early on that it is through family stories that we learn the important parts of where we came from and who we are. I will always be a figurative artist as this is where my heart lies, and I want my figures to always show authentic emotions, whatever those emotions may be. As to my relationship with grief and memories continues to evolve, I have come to realize that it is more like a partnership, we co-exist in the same space, and there are days when one has more to say than the other. But every day I have a conversation with them, and we find our voice together. I think for me, this is the way life goes now.

You live with aphantasia, which means you do not visualize images internally in the way many artists describe. How has this shaped the way you construct paintings and the way you trust intuition within your creative process?

To be honest, I didn’t know I had this condition until recently. I was talking to an artist friend, and she was describing her next composition, and I realized that her process was different from mine. So being an academic I began researching and discovered this condition and it made a lot of sense of my process. My mind is conceptual, not pictorial and to compose my compositions I tell myself a story. I use words to form the pictures. It does make it impossible for me to look at a blank canvas and just begin; I always have a photo reference or something similar. I have always been like this, so I never really thought about it. But realizing the reason I find it harder than most artists to do certain things has made accepting the limitations I do have and learning to use tools to help me achieve my goals. I feel sometimes like I do things backwards and I have learned that every process is unique to every person about everything, it’s just being human.

The palette in your work often leans toward restrained tones rather than vivid colour. Is that an instinctive aesthetic choice, or does colour function as a psychological language within your compositions?

It’s a combination of being an aesthetic choice as I tend towards colors that are calming and serene and it also functions as a language all in itself. Our most impactful moments in life are rarely in dramatic places, they usually happen in spaces that we feel safest in, and for me those spaces are never loud in color. The colors in my compositions add to the quietness and the impact of the scenes and it allows the figures to emerge and to have that conversation with the viewer. I really want the figures to have the moment and I feel that if the colors of the backgrounds are screaming, then the figures will be lost.

Your paintings frequently leave emotional space for the viewer to enter. How important is ambiguity in your work, and do you think a painting should answer questions or raise them?

When I was in university, I took an art history class, and we were exposed to all of the art movements and the critiques that accompany them. I came across Monet’s painting “Woman with a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son” and I was drawn into the composition right away. It spoke to me in ways I hadn’t experienced before. But it also asked questions, like why “…Her Son” and not our son, what is she thinking, why is the little boys face so ambiguous? I feel that art should always raise questions and artists should be the visual recorders of their times. And it is in these visual histories where we will find both questions and answers. But if we as artists scream the answer to the observer, then it ceases to be a conversation. It’s why my figures never scream at the viewer; they simply invite the viewer to ponder questions and think of their own answers, whatever those answers may be. 

Art history is full of artists who have explored the human figure as a vessel for cultural reflection. Which artists or movements have most influenced the way you approach figurative painting today?

Without a doubt it is the Impressionists. Masters like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camile Pissaro and Berthe Morisot play a huge role in my development, but it is Edgar Degas that has had the most influence. Even though he differs from the Impressionists in his color choices, his insistence on painting “real life” fascinates me and this has influenced my choices artistically. I like to peek behind the curtains of what we carefully cultivate for the public to see the authenticity in life. I’m fascinated by what people don’t want to see or acknowledge because I believe it is this space where we grow and develop. Degas liked to show moments of people that were overlooked or ignored in his time. Ballet dancers, prostitutes, mistresses and poverty were on display and became impossible to ignore. Truthfully it is one of the reasons he didn’t get to exhibit much in his lifetime, but these topics were authentic to him and his practice. I feel like this is more important than anything else. 

You have exhibited internationally and connected with audiences across different cultural contexts. Do viewers in different parts of the world respond differently to the emotional language of your work?

I do think that here in the US using nudity as a tool to express vulnerability is harder to do due to the American culture tends to be more prudish when viewing art that depicts the nude form and I don’t really run into that in other countries. But the conversation that the figure has with the observer is the same, the emotions are the same and that conversation with the canvas transcends languages and cultures, it is a human experience.  I think that American culture has a more difficult time looking honestly at these types of emotions for a variety of reasons and that makes it more difficult for an artist who works in nudes to exhibit.

For many artists the studio becomes a place of reflection, sometimes even healing. What role does the act of painting itself play in your life beyond the finished artwork?

The process of making art is where I live life. The studio can be anywhere and anything if I can create. We moved this past year from our home in Florida to our new home in Philadelphia and my studio at one point was a corner in my stepdad’s office. To me being creative is to be creative and understand that it is the process of creation that matters. I can very easily be sucked into the sales and chasing the 15 mins of fame, but all that does is lead me down a hole. So, for me it’s all about the process, from what gains my attention to the full canvas that comes to life.

Looking ahead, how do you see your work evolving in the coming years, and are there emotional or cultural territories you feel compelled to explore next? 

I’m very committed to improving my techniques and to challenging my skills, so I don’t see that changing. As far as how I will evolve, I really have no idea. The whole process is so organic that I really don’t know what lies ahead. I will always paint what captures my attention and I think grief will always be an undercurrent. How those two things will change (and it is inevitable that they will change) I could not begin to predict. That sounds like me being coy to garner attention, but it really is how I feel. Our world is in unchartered territory now, who knows what tomorrow will bring. But I will paint it.

Leigh Witherell’s practice sits firmly within a lineage of artists who understand that culture is not only shaped by what is visible, but by what is avoided. Her work does not offer spectacle or resolution, instead, it creates a space where difficult conversations can exist without being forced into conclusion.

Through restrained compositions and emotionally charged figures, she challenges the viewer to engage with vulnerability not as weakness, but as a necessary condition of being human. In doing so, her paintings become more than images, they act as cultural records, documenting a moment in time where uncertainty, grief, and identity remain in constant negotiation.

What Witherell ultimately offers is not an answer, but an invitation. To slow down. To sit with discomfort. And to recognise that within the quiet, there is still something urgent being said.