Lesley Patterson-Marx was born in 1975 in Louisville, Ky. She became obsessed with art in high school and took Saturday classes through the Louisville Visual Art Association. An Art teacher led her to the Summer Art Workshop for high school students at Murray State University in Murray, Ky.  She eventually attended college at Murray where she received her B.A. degree in Fine Art in 1997.  She then moved to nearby Paducah, Ky. where she was a working artist and teacher for nearly two years. She left Paducah in 1999 to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts degree in studio art at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Upon graduation in 2001, she was invited by one of her instructors, Judy Chicago, to work on “At Home, A Kentucky Project,” in Bowling Green Ky. While living in Bowling Green, Lesley began teaching in Nashville, commuting daily to Watkins College of Art and Design as an adjunct instructor. Upon completion of the “At Home” project, she moved to Nashville and was eventually hired as a full time instructor and gallery director at Watkins where she worked from 2001-2006. She and her husband Jonathan, a writer and musician, met at an art opening in Nashville and have a son, Abraham who was born in 2004. Also in 2004, along with students and friends, she helped to found Plate Tone Printshop, a non toxic, fine art community printshop. In Fall of 2006 she began teaching as a part time  instructor at University School of Nashville where she teaches book arts and printmaking to high school students. The artwork of Lesley Patterson Marx has been featured in several publications, including Readymade Magazine and New American Paintings MFA Annual. Her work has been exhibited nationally in  galleries including Wendy Cooper Gallery in Madison, WI and Cynthia Broan Gallery in New York City. She is represented in Nashville by Tag Gallery where she shows regularly.

Daily, throughout the year, no matter what the weather, I leave the familiarity of my home and begin an hour-long walk. It is a journey, a search, a daily ritual.

As I walked, I looked down at the sidewalk and found a robin’s egg. I held it lightly in my hand so as not to crush it. Mother bird, you and yours are mortal too. Many springs have passed and I have made a collection, delicate blue evidence of your labor and loss. I walked past a junk store and found a collection of old photographs of unknown people. They were brittle and golden leaves, the remains of lives lived long ago, plants who had long since gone to seed, whose origins have been forgotten.

I decided to take them with me, so that a gust of wind could not sweep them up into the swiftly moving river of everyone who has ever been. I have seen the changing of the seasons, and I have seen that everything that ascends must descend, and I have hoped that there would be a few exceptions, and I have learned that there will not. I have seen the black butterfly hovering behind my back.

I should walk more quickly. I should take these findings home and make something from them, I could make something as delicate as they are, a meditation on change and the longing for stillness and symmetry in a chaotic world…and I could bind them tightly with thread, preserve them, so that the vines can’t cover them.

No…I should walk more slowly so that I don’t miss anything else that I may stumble across. I can walk slowly and scan the edges of the sidewalk for some new discovery.