“There is nothing better than walking into a gallery and being greeted by the smell of oil paint.” Leslie Folksman

An Exhibition of the art of Leslie Folksman is pretty hard to find because these days, at this point in this career, he can rarely amass enough of his oil paintings at one time for a show.

“I have not been showing – I’m selling work regularly,” Leslie explains. He adds that there is now a group of collectors always interested in him in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area.

Like so many of his art community peers, Folksman did not plan to be an artist – he just is an artist. However, he didn’t always know it. “For me, being an artist was not really a conscious activity until somebody said that word, ‘artist, in relation to me and what I was doing.”

Folksman is self-taught. “Comic books were my introduction to art. I was 11 or 12 years old when I began to draw.”

Ironically, it was the child in Folksman that brought him his first break. He was painting “lots of animals and magic” when a friend helped him get a show at the local Children’s Hospital. The children liked his work – and he attracted interest fro the art community and the public as well.

Today, Folksman focuses on still life portrayals. He works in oils. “I like the way it looks, the way it smells, I like everything about it.”

“Also, I really like still-life work. It forces me to b e technically correct. Instead of painting things the way I want them to look, I’m painting things the way they do look.”

Folksman has a studio in his rural North Carolina home. He has collected at least a thousand still-life props, many of them natural, including a remarkable assortment of skulls picked up around his home and during his travels.

He likes to appoint birds and he is happy to state that he has “four dead birds in my freezer,” all of which were found dead in the outdoors. He also has a pair of ten-point antlers he found on the ground – strangely – without any other parts of the animal around.

Folksman is a full-time artiest…”unless I am mountain biking or snow boarding,” he adds.

He doesn’t plan his paintings. “They just evolve. I am not a strategist,” Folksman explains, “I suck at chess.” Despite the interest in still life, his work is also influenced by dreams – sleeping dreams or day dreams or sometimes a combination of the two.

“I don’t really have a message. I am not trying to make a statement.”

Is painting an obsession for him? “It certainly is,” he says. Before he began painting full time, he worked in a number of odd jobs through the years to keep a roof over his head. “I put up lightning rods for 15 years,” he recalls. “I also made teeth in a dental lab. I was a welder. I worked on motorcycles for a time, and I was a bricklayer’s apprentice – now that is one tough job.”