Lesta Frank

Lesta Frank has pursued her art since she was three years old. “I remember that my mom put some paper and some fingerprints on the floor, and I remember thinking ‘Oh my gosh, this is the most fun I’ve ever had. I just want to do this.’”

She pursued her education at UT Austin, followed by a BFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.

“I majored in printmaking,” she says, “because I felt like I could paint anywhere, but they had all these presses, and I just thought that would be interesting.”

Since then, she’s been painting, creating ceramics, and teaching classes. Currently she teaches classes in watercolor and mixed media in her home studio.

Lesta creates a lot of abstracts, such as our cover image, 'Autumn Wind'. Recently she's been working a lot with figurative abstracts.

"I’ll start out with drawing a face or figure," she says, "and then I look for what abstract elements would work with it. In both the figurative works and the abstracts, I kind of have a dialog with the painting in which the painting itself leads me to the next steps."