Art Seen: Lesley Dill’s visions in text and textile
By Edgar Allen Beem -January 12, 2022
As a teenager, artist Lesley Dill had a vision that influenced the rest of her life and art. It was an experience of the unity of all life that often visits sensitive souls.
“When I was 14,” Dill recalled, “I woke up one day and looked out my bedroom window. The oak leaves hadn’t fallen from the trees. Suddenly my screen went black and I felt a swoon, not a fainting, just an ‘Oh!’ My mental eye filled with strands of light. I was given to see murder and defilement along with beauty and grace and I understood them.”
This experience, akin to rapture, occurred while Dill was a student at Waynflete School in Portland and lived in Cumberland Foreside. Her father taught at Freeport High School and her mother at Waynflete. The vision soon vanished; Dill was a 20-year-old student at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, before it came back to her.
“It just blossomed within me and has stayed alive forever,” she said.