Whidbey Island Artist Leslie Stoner: Maze Paintings and Wood Grain Art | Seattle Art Source

Following the Grain: How Whidbey Island Artist Leslie Stoner Turns Wood and Mazes Into Meditative Art

Seattle Art Source Artist Leslie Stoner Featured in Luxe Interiors + Design

What if instead of covering up the natural beauty of your canvas, you let it lead the way?

That’s the philosophy behind the extraordinary maze paintings of Leslie Stoner, a Whidbey Island artist represented by Seattle Art Source. Where she once primed over the natural swirls and undulations of her birch panels, Stoner now makes them the foundation of everything. Armed with an array of archival felt-tip pens — ranging from hair-thin to boldly thick — she traces and emphasizes the wood’s grain until it takes on the graphic quality of faux bois. Then, she begins the mesmerizing process she calls “mazing”: drawing an intricate, serpentine labyrinth that spreads across the panel like a thin black veil. As a result, the patterns of wood and maze play off one another in an organic call-and-response.

The work is deeply rooted in place. Specifically, Stoner layers in hand-cut free-form shapes inspired by the landscape around her Whidbey Island studio — leaves, flowers, the distinctive bull kelp that washes up on the beach. She then places them on the panel as guides to maze around, before filling select shapes with metallic gold or black paint. Additionally, each finished piece receives a two-word title — Ebb.Flow, Waking.Dreams, Under.Foot — one word at the entrance of the maze, one at the finish. All of her mazes have a working path. However, nobody has yet claimed to have made it all the way through.

The meditative quality of the work is no accident. Stoner, a graduate of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, has been a doodler her whole life — filling pages with repetitive patterns as a way to calm her mind. A middle school teacher who showed her how to draw a brain maze set something in motion. Decades of work haven’t diminished this. “Mazing brings me peace,” she says. “It slows my thoughts and allows me to sink deeper into my mind. And I think it does the same for the viewer. It’s a bit of calm in a world filled with constant stimuli.” We couldn’t agree more — and we’re proud to bring her work to collectors across the Pacific Northwest.

Read the full feature on Luxe Interiors + Design here.