Leigh Werrell: "Balancing color is one of the most important tasks for me in any painting, on par with balancing shade and tone. My friend and a wonderful painter, Amanda Bush, used to talk to me in grad school about the importance of grey, and we would chat about how crucial it often is to find that neutral to make the bright colors feel more interesting. Using all bright or all neutral colors works sometimes but can often lead to garish or muddy combinations.

My husband is a bass guitar player and I think using grey is similar to including that instrument in a band: most people tend to pay more attention to the lead guitarist or singer, but the bass is always there in the background keeping the rhythm and enhancing the other parts to allow them to stand out in the best way possible..."

Maren Less: "As a child, I imagined no boundary between the internal and external. I try to keep that gray space alive in my practice: a space where hope, possibility, and play still thrive. I was enchanted by the worlds of Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak, and Lewis Carroll: artists who trusted in the intelligence of children, humor in the scary, and the mystery of being.

...I investigate place on a mostly subconscious level. Many of my earlier paintings are set in suburban landscapes, not intentionally, but because those environments were part of my everyday world. The places I spend time in, or even just long for, tend to seep into the work without me realizing it. I don't assign a hierarchy to anything in my process. If anything, I try to step out of the way and let the image lead. I draw to see what surfaces. The structure, the story, the space: they reveal themselves as I go, and sometimes only much later do I begin to understand their meaning."