Bio

Currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

Rebecca Ledbetter is an emerging artist, focusing primarily on abstract oil painting and encaustic painting. Her work embodies the abstraction of gesture, color, layers, and shadows to push and pull the space within her canvas to create an artistic narrative, inspired by the communication and often miscommunication in everyday life.

Website: rebeccaledbetter.com

Instagram: @rebecca.ledbetter.art

Artist Statement

Rebecca Ledbetter is an abstract artist, whose ekphrastic process is inspired by novels, poems, and other narratives to curate a dreamy and whimsical style of work. Inheriting her passion for painting from her grandfather, she studied and explored her studio practice at Denison University, where she earned special recognition for her work with painting, and later with video art. While at Denison, she participated in three group shows, including one with two other graduating seniors, entitled “At This Hour I Was Most Myself,” which was created, curated, fundraised, and organized at the Bryn Du Mansion in Granville, Ohio.

After graduating, she traveled to Martha’s Vineyard, where she became the Communications and Visual Artist Intern for local nonprofit dance venue, The Yard. For the duration of her time there, she created her next body of work, which concluded in two solo shows at The Yard and a local popup venue. It was there she unveiled her video art piece, “A Dream Within A Dream,” which centers around human relationships and communication, or rather more accurately, miscommunication, words that aren’t said, regret and loss. This film used a surrealist feeling of a different age and wrestles throughout the coming of age in a time when regret, memories, and things that aren’t said forever follow you in life.

Upon completion of her internship, she moved to Philadelphia in 2013 where she immersed herself in the artist community there. It was here she began to develop her independent studio practice, developing a body of work outside a structured institution, to transform her practice into a strong discipline. With the ethos of relationships and communications as an important crux of her work, she began exploring how the forms, colors, shadows, highlights of her palette could define that in a more meaningful way.

She continued seeking inspirations from narratives, poems, and other written work to guide the forms in the pieces, finding new ways to push the space within a canvas to create a story. Through this more structured process, she discovered a discipline of working, creating a structure to transform these emotional responses into thought-provoking and meaningful work, even discovering her own coming of age narrative through this work. This began to develop into the work that is seen today, where she discovers her style and answers the questions of what her work means to herself, her viewers, and to the world as a whole, while connecting her viewers with her work and everyday experiences. By developing this practice into her discipline she began to uncover what it really means to have a body of work and was able to use this time in Philadelphia to explore what that meant to her. Today, you can find her experimenting with small to large scale work, incorporating textures and materials into her canvas, and unearthing the definition of what a painting is to her.

Rebecca Ledbetter is an abstract artist, whose ekphrastic process is inspired by novels, poems, and other narratives to curate a dreamy and whimsical style of work. She received her BA in Studio Art from Denison University in 2013, and since then, has showcased work in Philadelphia, Granville, OH and Martha’s Vineyard, and currently resides and works in Philadelphia.