Steppin' Out Again

Walk the Sausalito waterfront on a working morning and you will feel something of what Leslie Allen carries back to her studio: the geometry of dry-docked hulls, the grid of warehouse windows catching early light, the hum of industry layered over the quiet pull of the Bay. This painting holds all of that. The interlocking rectangles are not arbitrary — they are the architecture of a place she has inhabited for nearly forty years, translated into colour and gesture the way a cellist translates a score: faithfully, and entirely her own. The sinuous black line that bisects the lower canvas is perhaps the painting's most intimate confession. It moves the way music moves — not in a straight line, but in a curve that resolves somewhere unexpected. Around it, teal washes and ochre planes negotiate their borders with the ease of long acquaintance, while a luminous amber form on the right glows like a porthole at dusk. Scratched blue marks in the upper centre carry the ghost of Allen's aquatint training at Crown Point Press, surfaces within surfaces, time within time. To stand before this painting is to be let into a conversation that has been going on for decades — between a woman and a place, between rhythm and structure, between the waterfront and the canvas. It asks nothing of you except attention, and in return it gives back something different every time you look.