Biography
Lea (Calvani) Bodea was raised in Budd Lake, NJ. She attended college in Rochester, NY, and received a BA in English Literature with a concentration in African and Women’s Studies. After graduating, Lea spent the next 20 years in Charlottesville, VA. In 2016 she decided to move from a career in the fields of Autism, Child Development and Trauma and relocate to Baltimore, MD committing herself to making art as full time as possible.
When Lea moved to Baltimore, she had assembled an extensive portfolio of 20 years of watercolor and ink work. While playing music and working in challenging careers, Lea was active in practicing spiritual/art therapy to better express her interior world.
When she was young and not living far from New York, she was raised by parents who brought her and her brother to the city regularly. Lea’s early exposure to masterwork artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern art, the Guggenheim and the Whitey galleries, and visiting the Hayden Planetarium, Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall, deeply influenced, inspired, and reinforced her creative path.
From an early age, she remembers her grandmother Rose pulling out large size museum master coloring books for herself, while the kids would be scribbling in theirs. Lea’s use of black lines in her artwork is directly influenced by her grandmother’s coloring books—as well as the stained glass of churches in the Catholic tradition in which she was raised.
In 2019, Lea submitted several pieces of her work into a group art show entitled, “Cathartic, Art that Heals” at Atlas Gallery in Mt. Vernon. Since moving to Baltimore, she started meeting other artists and making connections. Lea began regularly showing her work at Artdromeda in the iconic Montgomery Ward Building, and was included in a group show during Artscape that year at Hancock Solar Gallery.
Lea continued to explore acrylic paint on canvas in the linework and imagery echoing her early watercolor work into 2020. When the pandemic came, she went on an extensive exploration of more abstract representations. She moved back to her most familiar medium, watercolor paper, she learned to manipulate acrylic paint more than brushing it. She relied on the depth and emotion of the experience rather than the identifiable images that came from it, befitting the nebulous pandemic era.
2023 brought Lea to Baltimore County where she has been primarily experimenting with collage and acrylic paint. She has been working on a new collection which leans into more conceptual art. Lea sees working this way as combining elements of what is real and what’s unreal, working through the awkward transition or intersection between the exterior and interior worlds. Lea continues to pursue making art as full time as possible, while developing her website and business.
When Lea moved to Baltimore, she had assembled an extensive portfolio of 20 years of watercolor and ink work. While playing music and working in challenging careers, Lea was active in practicing spiritual/art therapy to better express her interior world.
When she was young and not living far from New York, she was raised by parents who brought her and her brother to the city regularly. Lea’s early exposure to masterwork artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern art, the Guggenheim and the Whitey galleries, and visiting the Hayden Planetarium, Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall, deeply influenced, inspired, and reinforced her creative path.
From an early age, she remembers her grandmother Rose pulling out large size museum master coloring books for herself, while the kids would be scribbling in theirs. Lea’s use of black lines in her artwork is directly influenced by her grandmother’s coloring books—as well as the stained glass of churches in the Catholic tradition in which she was raised.
In 2019, Lea submitted several pieces of her work into a group art show entitled, “Cathartic, Art that Heals” at Atlas Gallery in Mt. Vernon. Since moving to Baltimore, she started meeting other artists and making connections. Lea began regularly showing her work at Artdromeda in the iconic Montgomery Ward Building, and was included in a group show during Artscape that year at Hancock Solar Gallery.
Lea continued to explore acrylic paint on canvas in the linework and imagery echoing her early watercolor work into 2020. When the pandemic came, she went on an extensive exploration of more abstract representations. She moved back to her most familiar medium, watercolor paper, she learned to manipulate acrylic paint more than brushing it. She relied on the depth and emotion of the experience rather than the identifiable images that came from it, befitting the nebulous pandemic era.
2023 brought Lea to Baltimore County where she has been primarily experimenting with collage and acrylic paint. She has been working on a new collection which leans into more conceptual art. Lea sees working this way as combining elements of what is real and what’s unreal, working through the awkward transition or intersection between the exterior and interior worlds. Lea continues to pursue making art as full time as possible, while developing her website and business.