review excerpts:
(my favorites)


Seven Days
"A Rose is a Rose...
Leslie Montana paints as big as her surname would suggest. The 3-foot-tall close-ups of flowers, currently exhibited at the GalleryOpaline are easily as sumptuous and sexy as Georgia O'Keeffe's. Bloomin' beautiful.”
writer - Marc Awody


The New York Times
Art Review / On The Towns,
"The Montclair Artist Colony: Then and Now"
The Montclair Art Museum
“Haven For Creative Talents, Then And Now”
excerpt: Back then artists came to Montclair for many reasons, but a cohesive group had crystallized around the most prominent among them, the landscape painter George Innes, who began frequenting Montclair in 1878 and made it his primary residence in 1885... Yet what a contrast! It's hard to imagine what men like (George) Innes or (Frederick Ballard) William's would have made of today's art; could they even have recognized it as such? Even the genres they knew, like landscape and portraiture, have changed beyond recognition... The technical finesse of Leslie Montana's Angelique Tulip" (1994) (pictured in article) might have struck a chord, although the hallucinatory concentration she achieves by isolating the hyper detailed blossom from the surrounding context would have seemed dangerously irrational... Even more, perhaps, than they would perhaps, be puzzled by the individual works, the sheer heterogeneity of the art being produced today would have astounded the gentlemen (and very few ladies) of Innesse's circle, as would the multiethnic nature of the community from which this variety springs. Neither is there any one dominant style today,... Still, one can't help wishing that the contemporary selection had been limited to half the number of participants — more like 17 in the historical section — to keep a certain degree of rigor or ambition in view. A laudable yearning for inclusiveness contradicts itself when dilution of quality makes inclusion less desirable.
writer - Barry Shwabsky


Beautiful Bouquets; Flowers Are Blooming Year Long In This Artists Garden
The Star Ledger / Suburban New Jersey
Cover Story
excerpt: Leslie Montana celebrates the joy of Spring everyday. As one of Montclair's newest artists Montana's paintings celebrate flowers in a kind of detail that challenges the works of Mother Nature herself. "Flowers typify beauty in our world. No two are alike and in their colors are breath taking," explains Montana as she sits in her studio gallery amid her canvas garden of larger than life roses cabbage roses and sunflowers... "I remember looking into the buds (as a child) and marveling at the different shades and colors — no two were alike, and I felt almost hypnotized by their fragrance and beauty." One has only to look at Montana's "Giant Roses of Love," to see the impact those early recollections had on the budding artist.
writer - Rose L. Ehrisman

With Opening of New Gallery, An Artist Comes To Full Flower
The Montclair Times / Arts and Entertainment
excerpt: Rose is a rose is a rose? Beg to differ, Ms. Gertrude Stein. You just didn't live long enough to see the 6-by-6-foot "Roses Of Love" created by Ms. Leslie Montana. Working hard. Working intensely. With intense focus and intense joy. There is so much I want to express, capture, achieve, do, explore, get into each painting." she says breathlessly... Once she felt like a sinner, cast from the Eden of urban, brittle, hip-to-a-fare-thee-well Soho arts culture for unseemly yearnings to paint "prissy" pictures of flowers... "I didn't have the confidence to insist on my own vision. I just wasn't ready." Things had to germinate inside her— and that took ten years... "Then one day this flower painting came out," she says, wondrously, as if beholding the first surprising crocus on a snowy spring morn'. "It had been growing inside me all that time." And it grew to gargantuan dimension. "Roses of Love," the close-up photorealistic portrait of a bouquet of pink roses that Montana uses as an icon for her first exhibition, is 6 x 6. "lotus," a depiction of the mystical water lily encompassing both pond and sky, is 6 x 8.
writer - Antoinette Martin


Galleries Offer Voice to Artists in Montclair
The New Jersey Herald / Cover Story
excerpt: I landed at Leslie Montana's Studio as one of my last stops of the day, situated on the second floor of the towns old court house. Entering Montana's canvas garden is like getting a blood transfusion. Her work has the sense of bursting forth, of absorbing all light, of bringing a sense of the infinite into the fleeting of nature's compositions. nature is so concentrated here that one feels as if in a trance, as if you could see right through nature to its very bone structure. Her work holds it breath and breaths furiously all at once.
writer - Sherry Karasik


An Artist in Her Kitchen
The Burlington Free Press / Cover Story
Photo spread: Artist Leslie Montana stands in front of the painting Roses of Love.
excerpt: In addition to her signature hyper-real paintings of roses, which can be found in private collections across the country, a recent show of Montana's work at Burlington's Opaline (gallerie@opaline) included delicate watercolors of both chard and kale..." I was walking in the garden and there they were so stunningly beautiful that I really wanted to celebrate them" she says. Before she took them into the kitchen, however, the former restaurant owner set up here easel in the garden and painted them. Nature might be her inspiration, but she often gets the creative juices flowing in the kitchen. "For me, the way I work: I wake up and start in the kitchen," Montana says. "I have to work with my hands. I go out in the garden and see what's on my palet today. The flavors of the day sort of present themselves."
writer - Melissa Pasanen


Articles available upon request.
email info@lesliemontana.com
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