Leah Rainey

Bio

Leah Rainey is a Toronto based painter who works within a combined tradition of process painting and direct painting. Often experimenting with found or unconventional tools and using a broad range of techniques, she is interested in how elements within painting interconnect through coincidence, suggestion and the accidental.

Her work explores the elusive ground between the physical presence of the painted surface and latent memories, association and thought. Distilled abstract or semi-abstract compositions evolve through many iterations. Working with a reductive process of editing to explore the visual space around and between things, Rainey observes and reveals that which is often overlooked; what we unconsciously register. Her paintings celebrate a world outside of any recognizable narrative while hinting at the familiar.

Leah Rainey grew up surrounded by nature in rural Ontario. She attended Loughborough College of Art and Design and received her BA Honours in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her work is in the public collections of Christ College, Cambridge and the Sheffield City Council UK, and private collections in North America. Rainey lives and works in Toronto, Canada.