Bio

Diving into story, color, and the unknown.

Born in Los Angeles and trained at UC Santa Barbara, Leticia Lacy brings a rich visual storytelling background to her fine art practice. Before turning full-time to painting, she worked as a background painter and art director for some of animation’s most iconic shows—including Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and The Powerpuff Girls. Today, she channels that same narrative instinct into contemporary work that explores risk, resilience, and transformation—often through the lens of a single swimmer.

Her ongoing figurative series features women poised between moments—diving from clouds, floating midair, or gazing toward new horizons. With vivid palettes and cinematic framing, her work merges California cool with quiet emotional depth. The result is vintage nostalgia reimagined through a modern, female perspective—balancing bold color with softness, motion with stillness.

In addition, she also paints abstracts that are equally distinctive and bold. In this series, she focuses purely on shape language and composition. In these pieces, transparent neon tubes are painted in pleasing compositions circling to the unknown. Futuristic and detailed, her abstract works are playful and burst with color in an optimistic perspective of what’s to come.

In 2024 alone, her work was collected and exhibited across the country, including shows in Austin, Palm Beach, Dallas, and Santa Fe. In California, her paintings have appeared in group exhibitions from San Francisco to Palm Springs. A signature element of her practice is her use of circular wood panels—portals, she says, that open onto another place and time.

Leticia paints with intention and instinct. Her work doesn’t just tell a story—it invites the viewer to leap in.

Statement

After twenty years working collaboratively in tv animation, making personal art again felt restorative and energizing. I was diving into a new part of my journey, my own creative practice.

My current fine art work begins when I drive up to an art space inside Cope Studios in Glendale CA. Through my studio window, I see palm trees that often sneak into my paintings. Being a Los Angeles native, I like to celebrate California’s color, diversity, plants and nature. I find myself always trying to capture that sparkly spirit that I’ve called home either in an abstract painting or in depicting a bird of paradise growing on the side of a freeway. 

In addition, the many inspiring females in my life continue to pop up in my work; whether they are leaping from clouds into the dream-time or watching the chaos of the world behind sunglasses.  I continue my art practice with gratitude and I look forward to every painting.