Fine Art by Lori DeLeonardis-Aman
BIOGRAPHY
Lori De Leonardis-Aman is a versatile and prolific professional painter, illustrator, and cartoonist. Born in Albany, New York in 1957, her formative private art education from ages nine to eighteen included the Albany Art Gallery, Heatherbrooks Studios, Malden Bridge School of Art and the Albany Institute of History and Art. In 1979 Lori received a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education from New York State College at Buffalo. She won first place in the Western New York State Collegiate Purchase Award Drawing Exhibition with a pen and ink drawing of a hawk's wing which is in the permanent collection at the Charles Burchfield Center at Buffalo State's college campus. Lori moved to Rochester and received a Masters of Science in Teaching, summa cum laude, from Nazareth College of Rochester in 1984.
In 1982 she and her husband created a watercolor caricature, Zachary Bear ®. From 1983 to 1997 Lori participated in many arts festivals locally and throughout the northeast selling variations of her character. In 1991, they established the Zachary Bear Store, in Webster, New York, with associates Ed Huehn and later Lisa Fox. This became a place to produce and promote her artwork along with personalized gifts and color reproduction services for other artists.
Lori's painting styles include realism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. She works in a variety of media including oils, acrylics, watercolors, pen and ink, pastels, and pencil. Her work represents a variety of subject matter such as portraiture, figurative, landscapes, still lifes, pet portraits, florals, house portraits, lighthouses and whimsical cartoon caricatures. She enjoys creating copies of such masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", Renoir's "Little Girl with Watering Can", Winslow Homer's "Maine Guides" and Vincent van Gogh's "Bedroom".