Welcome to Ara Leites Gallery

“ When I teach drawing or painting, I am teaching how to see and how to love. As an artist and painter, I am reminding the world of the potential of beauty. As a teacher and artist, I hope that I convey how much I love the world and my life. The world is a wonderous creation. Living in it means I've had to grasp that it represents itself as 50% 'good' and 50% 'less good.' Sometimes the need to create ones own beauty from inner responses to this environment outweighs the need to reproduce recognizable and/or realistic subject matter.”
—Ara Leites

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What others are saying about Ara Leites paintings...

"The International Exhibition sponsored by the San Diego Watercolor Society is regarded as one of the most prestigious watercolor shows nationally. The winner of the Best of Show $1000 prize is Ara Leites of Santa Cruz. The winning piece called "The Choice" is apatio setting with Mexican leather strap chairs and table covered with a pristine white cloth. There is an image of a mysterious figure barely exposed. Leites has been focusing on tables and chairs in recent compositions as she believes these simple furniture pieces plan an integral part in the interpersonal mien of the human condition. The artist hopes the viewer will enter this scene and project and interpret his own reaction or experience to the setting."

-Downtown News, San Diego, CA September 20, 2001

“ Ara Leites' artwork shifts from abstracts to realism. One of her abstracts, "Three" was selected for Canada's juried Aim for Arts International exhibition in Vancouver, B.C. Ara is one of only 210 artists from around the world whose work was selected for the show. Her painting won the Opus Framing and Art Supply Award of $1000. The painting features a large figure three tilted at an angle so that it runs off the edges of the picture plane and the concept of 'three' is repeated in a variety of ways: three wide bars with three equal spaces, three photo-transferred images, three as a smaller figure in a different lettering style, three dots. The announcement came as Ara, who teaches at the Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School, returned from the Tuscany region of Italy where she taught a two-week watercolor plein-aire workshop."

-Dawna Bratten Santa Cruz Sentinel, Santa Cruz, CA September 23, 2000