Painter and sculptor June Leaf died on July 1, 2024, aged 94.

In Paris, Ms. Leaf told Hyperallergic, she had spent her time “with my head down, looking at textures, and patterns in the sidewalks. I was thinking about Mark Tobey and Paul Klee,” she said. “I was still rooted in the abstract tradition. I made a small painting of cobblestones.”

“I work with these figures until I am released from them,” she told Hyperallergic. “I am just grateful when I can be liberated from these creatures that come and stop me dead in my tracks.”

Sexual politics continued to engage her, most strikingly in the multimedia work “Woman Drawing Man” (2014), in which a male nude looks down, dismayed, as a kneeling woman applies the point of her pencil to his genitals.

<Sigh> “Woman Drawing Man” isn’t illustrated in the article.

(William Grimes, June Leaf, Artist Who Explored the Female Form, Dies at 94,” New York Times, 7-2-24)

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