Luminalia features the work of Canada-based artist Patricia Leidl. A former journalist, illustrator, author and International Communications Director for various UN organizations and USAID, Leidl has recently returned to her first love—which is fine art. Her work is both puckish, dark and deploys ancient motifs that speak to the human condition in all of its pathos, tragedy, beauty and absurdity. Leidl focuses on the figure, but also on beasts both real and fabulous. Both inhabit surreal worlds of which the territory of dreams are made.
The Eye of the Heart: The art of Patricia Leidl
Prior to her return to art, Patricia Leidl lived in Australia, Hong Kong, New York, Geneva and Bonn. From 2008 onwards she was deployed in her capacity of Communications Director to hotspots such as Afghanistan and Yemen for USAID.
Her 2015 book, co-authored with Valerie M. Hudson, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy won a Prose Prize that same year, a Kirkus Starred Review and was short-listed for many others. She has spoken before the Annapolis War College, done a TedX talk and moderated a number of peace panels focusing on the war in Yemen.
Leidl is also a former speechwriter for Yemeni Nobel Laureate Tawakkol Karman and has consulted with International NGOs around the world.
In 2021, a sudden and chronic illness forced Leidl to 'recalibrate' and reluctantly give up her former peripatetic existence. Nevertheless, Leidl sees the visual arts as a continuation of a life-long thirst for knowledge—albeit into the internal and universal as opposed to the external, historical, journalistic and humanitarian. As with her previous career, Leidl art explores what it means to be human—to be born, to hope, to suffer, to dream, to love and to die.
Visual influences include religious iconography, medieval symbolism, angels, demons, familiars and the enduring solace of the natural world—but rendered in a style that is both unique and recognizably her very own.
Gautama Buddha once exhorted all humans, "to participate with joy in the sorrows of the world" Leidl's art aims to do just that: To provoke and to inspire contemplation even as it seeks to invoke pleasure and to amuse.
"It is as if the universe has dragged me kicking and screaming back into what I was meant to do," she muses. "I loved my old life," she notes. "But after witnessing so much suffering, I've come to understand that providing a sensual experience through our most primal mode of expression remains a necessary counterpoint to this stunningly lovely, but chronically disordered world."
Patricia Leidl holds a Diploma in Journalism, A Bachelors of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a Masters of Graduate Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University.