With a skilled hand and an eye for the movement and fluidity of light, Marc van der Leeden enters us into a meditative world of seascapes and pastoral scenes in his watercolors. If the viewer can smell the sea, it is due not to the painting's foundation in reality but rather to the associations the abstract nature of his work conjures. Van der Leeden creates landscapes that include not only natural forms, but also architectural structures in an unexpected yet fitting way. Lighthouses and bridges become fluid, natural, and at home in their surrounding environment. With confident brush-strokes of milky blues and browns, one settles into the timeless comfort of beaches and ruins. But van der Leeden's work is wistful, not sentimental. The self-taught artist gains our trust with his abstract shapes that suggest very real, memorable forms like pieces of a story. Images of the serene and familiar seascape are fragmented as only memories are – flashes in the ocean foam.

Marc Van der Leeden graduated from the University of Massachusetts and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City, and currently resides in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.