LESLIE GIULIANI

Leslie Giuliani is an American contemporary artist. Her work combines encaustic painting, oil painting, printmaking, rug hooking and digital embroidery. 

Giuliani’s recent works have focused on interpreting her original drawings into stitch-able digitized embroidery files. These she sews, with colorful thread combinations as her palette, onto an archival microfiber paper she has painted and printed with Encaustic and Oil paint. To the colorful, painted embroidered images, she stitches down appliquéd shapes cut from other paintings and prints, finally adding decorative machine stitching accents and sequins. The embellishments create a fantastic world for the drawings to inhabit. The imagery can be quirky, surrealistic and sometimes humorous. 

“Artists often have many loves in terms of the materials they enjoy using but sometimes feel they must switch hats and work with them separately. Wanting to combine my love of textile work, encaustic painting, drawing, and technology led me to digital machine embroidery. I wanted to remove the “hand” from my drawing practice. I felt it would give me less control and open me up, via new technical limitations, to new images.  I was also inspired by Louise Bourgeois's use of digital embroidery (via master printer Judith Solodkin) in her prints. Now I think of the textured-motif stitch lines as my drawing lines and the threads as my colored pencils. Absorbent microfiber material allows me to paint and print with oil and wax and then stitch heavily through the paint, without tearing. I hope to share this odyssey of trial, many errors and inspirations that led to this exploration of a new way to make a painting.”

Born in Philadelphia, PA, Giuliani received her BFA in Fine Art from The University of Delaware, with further studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Her work is represented in collections of the Housatonic Museum of Art, the State of CT, and many private collections. She was the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism for Craft. She is Core Support Instructor for R&F Handmade Paints. Giuliani lives and works in Weston, CT.