Leighann McPartland

Leighann McPartland is an illustrator from the small town of Chester, New York. After applying for her Bachelors of Fine Arts, she stumbled across illustration, and suddenly all the years of doodling in the margins of her notebooks made sense. Leighann has earned Dean's List every semester since transferring even being accepted into the Transfer's National Honor Society, Tau Sigma.

She has shown work in exhibitions and publications and plans to continue to do so. Leighann dreams of becoming a tattoo artist while also doing freelance illustration and eventually creating her comic series. 

In due time, she would like to receive her MFA and be able to teach at a collegiate level, giving the same time and knowledge to her students that her professors once had given her.

College is a real-time of self-discovery in the sense that no one knows who they are and are trying on all sorts of different hats to find out. In this struggle to find out, we make choices and mistakes which can completely alter the way we see the world around us, whether good or bad. In my time at Oswego, I've been able to have insight into my psyche. As a result, this experience has helped fuel my drive to create for the rest of my life.

I use illustration as a form of self-guided therapy by creating worlds and realities that help me cope with addiction, battle depression, and explore my spirituality. While I don't consider myself religious, I find myself spiritual. In the vastness of the universe, we are both nothing and everything. We gain from it what we put into it. The pieces I have on display are autobiographical, touching on issues of self, identity, and ego. In both the creation process and the final imagery, these pieces have helped heal me, have helped strengthen me, and have helped me grow as both an artist and an individual.