Leila Currah is an American artist, known for her breadth of natural talent, versatility, and willingness to experiment.
Her favorite media are watercolor, illustration board, oil on canvas, acrylic on walls, alabaster, language (short prose and poetry), and the human form (yoga and dancing). She also practices ikebana, the spiritual art of Japanese flower arranging.
Life as an artist began as a child. Her artistic inclinations must have been apparent earlier than she can remember, but her first memory of making art is somewhere around the age of four, when she would concentrate for hours on coloring carefully within the lines in her coloring books. A few years later, she was taking classes at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park and making ‘plein air’ drawings, seated in the shade by its infamous lily pond. She also explored painting, loom weaving and basket making when she was very young, encouraged by her parents and all of her teachers to do more.
She attended Torrey Pines High School, where she took ceramics, life drawing, and studio art classes with two exceptional teachers, Fred Marinello and Robert Petitmermet. She also studied watercolor privately with Jenifer Broomberg. Jenifer’s influence is visible in her watercolor paintings to this day, and watercolor continues to be a favorite medium, especially when painting flowers.
In college, she shifted gears to study science, beginning at UCLA with a major in Astrophysics, a couple years later, dropping out so she could find herself through dance, acting and music at a city college instead, while she worked part-time at an art company doing digital image restoration, and then finally returning to UCLA to finish her degree in Neuroscience.
It was during her college years that she met master artist E.J. Gold and began her studies with him. E.J. has helped her more than anyone to see art less as a product and more as a process of inner effort and transformation. Her classes with him earlier on were deeply therapeutic and changed her orientation completely towards her own artistic purpose. With his guidance, she began to understand experientially that the creative process has the power to reveal deep insight which, in turn, informs the process of living a life with greater meaning.
E.J. also taught her practical skills, how to take care of her brushes, how to cut and stretch canvas, and how to gesso. During the first years that he began creating his JazzArt, including some truly monumental stage backdrops for jazz venues, she often gessoed the canvases that he would use. She occasionally helped with installations at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles and for IAJE, and was exposed to some wonderful jazz music in the process, which later led to some of her own jazz portraiture.
After completing a yoga teacher training in 2011, Leila began a series of “Yoga Studies” using acrylic ink and papercuts. Other recent work includes “Breathing Conglomerate Life.” She is also presently engaged in several muraling projects which haven’t made it yet to the gallery pages.
Leila is married with two children and lives in California.