About the Artist

"As I held the crayon in my four-year-old hand and tried to stay in the lines, Mamá came over.  'That's a coloring book.  Why don't you try making your own pictures to color?'  It was her way of encouraging my siblings and me to create the world as we saw it, not as someone dictated it to us.

As an Artist today, I like to step outside the box.  Being a synesthete, a person whose senses cross, I often experience printed letters or music notes as color.  I paint with vivid hues that might invoke a symphony of harmonies and chords.  Impressionism is one of my greatest influences in allowing suggestions of shapes and boundaries rather than lines."

Whether painting landscapes or flowers, Leela Marcum brings out the essence and soul of each subject using softer lines and gentle coercion contrasted with bold and definitive images.  Some of her paintings, as in the series of fences, question where one stands - in or out, included or excluded, protected or vulnerable, confined or free.  Meanwhile, the paintings reflect the natural world of plants.  Do you see the grass as greener on the other side of the fence, or do you enjoy the poppy dancing and celebrating its last bit of glory?  Leela Marcum's paintings are provocative and playful.  She depicts the natural world with its beautiful, organic determination.

Born in 1947 in Los Alamos, New Mexico where her father, Donald W. Mueller, worked on the Manhattan Project, Ms. Marcum grew up with the contradictory emotions of being proud of her father's work to end the war to save thousands of lives and profoundly sad about the devastation of the bomb.  This dichotomy is reflected in her art work which is both realistic in shapes and divergent in colors.  She defines herself as a Contemporary Realist.

Though Leela Marcum's father tried to discourage her pursuit of art as he considered it strictly a hobby that she could do while being a housewife, her mother, Frances Mueller, understood her joy for art and enrolled her in sketching lessons on the weekends while she was in elementary school.  She also helped Ms. Marcum bypass the requirement for Home Economics for girls in junior high and high school so that art could fit into her daughter's already busy schedule.  Frances arranged for her teenage daughter to take an adult class in ceramics.

Without her parents' knowledge, Leela Marcum majored in a self-created program in Humanities which allowed her to participate in art classes when given the chance while she attended Pitzer College, Claremont, California.  She was able to take classes at Scripps and Pomona before Pitzer had an art program.  Ms. Marcum's efforts were rewarded by receiving the honor to have a solo exhibit of ceramics at the Ruth Candler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College.  Ms. Marcum was also chosen to represent the Claremont Colleges at the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry for her ceramics.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, near Los Alamos, offers inspiration by the many artists who settle there.  Among Marcum's influences early on was Alan House, the sculptor, who told her about using negative spaces to tell her story.  At Pitzer, one art professor took the charcoal pencil and used it on her sketch to show how trees should be angular and not the flowing branches as Georgia O'Keeffe painted.  She was offended.   This was not at all like the paintings of the black-hatted woman she spotted sometimes walking in downtown Santa Fe.

In 2005, Leela and Robert Marcum bought a bookstore/coffee and teahouse in Pacific Grove, California, which they gutted and remodeled to include a stage for music and a gallery for local artists.  Later, Ms. Marcum would take over the gallery for her own work which depicted the flora and fauna of the coast in watercolors, the environment always being a focus.  The award winning Leela Marcum participated in solo, juried, and group shows around the Monterey Peninsula.

The Marcum's sold the store in 2013 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015 where the Artist has a marvelous studio with great views of the mountains which inspire many of her landscapes.  "We traded the ocean for the skies."

Today,  Leela Marcum's  popular oil paintings are featured at La Posada de Santa Fe.  The land of New Mexico called her home.