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Walking up to the Tulsa home of photographer and mixed media artist Leslie Hoyt, creativity abounds when viewing the flowers and gardens surrounding the front of the home, including a lovely front window that opens the home to the outdoors. I would learn that this front yard is minor compared to the garden found in the back.
Hoyt and her husband Brad, an internal physician who now serves as Chief Medical Information Officer with Ardent Health Services (the company that owns Hillcrest where he previously practiced in Tulsa) allowing them more travel time together, which you’ll learn has been a goal she has worked toward in her own career moves, have established a designing locale right in their abode, both inside and out, for her to create.
Leslie Lake Hoyt graduated from Ponca City Senior High School in 1979 (Husband Brad was a 1980 Po-Hi grad). She fondly remembers it as a great place to grow up. Conoco was heavily involved in the city, and when she went to Washington Elementary, she remembers they donated a working lab for science to the school. She also loved that, although Ponca City wasn’t really small, we were small enough to have only one high school so that we all had the chance to get to know one another. She loved being in journalism at East Junior High and then continuing onto the Yearbook at high school.
Leslie Hoyt has always created. After graduating from high school, she received her business degree from Oklahoma State University and worked for JD Edwards, a software developer for 15 years, with many of those years as a Client Services manager. When they first moved to Tulsa, Hoyt worked from home but finally retired in 1999 because work required her to be away from the busy life of her three children more than she desired.
At that point, she moved to photography as a hobby, taking class after class, including those in portraiture, and beginning to buy better equipment as her skills developed. In 2005, she began a portrait business that grew in ways she could never have dreamed. Hoyt explains how she found herself always focusing on the smaller, intimate details in portraits. She learned to look at light and how it added texture to the photographs.
Hoyt earned her industry degree through the Professional Photographers of America. Mastering her skills through classes was one avenue, but Leslie also found she could hone her skills through competition. “Getting involved in PPA, along with my state and local photography organizations, was a game changer for me. I love being an active part of the photography community,” Hoyt says. “I learned so much from entering images into the various competitions and getting feedback from jurors as to what worked.” Competitions for Hoyt were local, state, regional and even included the International Photographic Competition. She loved to expand her horizons of learning, and she now serves as a juror with these organizations to provide her expertise with others.
People noticed her extraordinary skills as a photographer. Hoyt produced many of the cover images for TulsaKids magazine, a very high-profile venture for her business and one that was personally rewarding for her. In addition, producers of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover” asked Hoyt to create portraits of a family during a segment of the show filmed in Tulsa that were then used throughout the remodeled house on the episode. “It was such a fun experience,” she says.
The fun has led to many awards, and her most recent is one of her favorites. Professional Photographers of Oklahoma honored her last year with the National Award for “meritorious contributions to professional photography.” Hoyt, a long-time member and past president of the organization, was moved to be honored by the group that has meant so much to her growth professionally and personally.
She also achieved Diamond Photographer of the Year, the top level a photographer can achieve in competition, as well as having portraits that were finalists for the Grand Imaging Awards in the Children’s Portraiture division. Her niche in the portraiture world became solid with beautiful, classic and classy black and whites. They were her trademark.
After years of success in the world of portraiture, she decided to make another move to free up her time even more for travel and family. When turning the camera to flora, time frees up because you are only concerned with light and other natural elements rather than appointments. However, Leslie found she still used much of what she’d learned with her portrait work when photographing even an individual flower. She could easily spend 40 minutes on one flower for the perfect photo. She enjoys nature. Going for walks after rain, she’d study the details and photograph drops of rain on the flowers and leaves, and she has a series of photos of rocks from different angles after a rain.
As owner/photographer of Leslie Hoyt Fine Art, you can find her work at lesliehoyt.com, and I encourage you to browse through these selections of photography and other items for purchase. Her eye for display of them is remarkable, and you will not be disappointed in what you find on the website.
Now she’s moved further into a more mixed media art world, still using her photography as a component in her work but not only that. Hoyt has taken even more diverse art classes, and she explains, “I’ve been playing with all kinds of traditional art materials and processes like acrylics, watercolor, encaustic wax, and am also experimenting with a variety of ways to print my photos.” She has moved out of traditional photography and into some very experimental mixed media art techniques that have led to fun explorations. She has found herself needing a variety of different tools than she had used previously, and even her husband’s profession has come in handy, helping her find an old x-ray viewer that she uses as her light box for some of her new artwork.
Hoyt has a drive to continue to learn new ways to create, and where before all her work was digital, now much of it is formed in diverse hands-on ways. Explaining the difference these new processes allow, Leslie says, “In my photography, I was very technical, controlled all aspects of my process and worked hard to make everything perfect. The biggest thing I learned by working with these other art materials is that, as Bob Ross said, there are lots of ‘happy accidents’!” She now finds that by letting go of some control, she discovers unexpected and beautiful results, still using her photography as part of the process while incorporating other materials as well.
Helping her continue her creative drive are a couple of small, select online groups of women she collaborates ideas with that keep one another motivated to grow in their art and creativity. She said one is a Challenge group, which brings strong creative ideas within their art to each other, and the other is a group that meets and even provides presentations to the others in the group. Hoyt provided a presentation to the group when they met in Mexico City recently that was on the idea of how “Life Imitates Art” — an interesting concept since we so often hear the opposite. Mainly, what we can learn from the idea of these groups and the other organizations Leslie surrounds herself with is that there is great value in keeping creative artists and ideas around you to keep your own creativity flowing so that you do not become stagnant. Leslie has proven herself to always rise to new challenges to engage her spirit.
Hoyt says that her life has seemed to be laid out in Acts and may be much like Jane Fonda describes in her TedTalk entitled “The Third Act” where the staircase continues to ascend because the human spirit is the one element in us that can always evolve upward. For Leslie Hoyt, life changes and so shall she. She says, “You learn that how you react to it is the biggest challenge.” When you desire to continue to learn, life’s challenges are opportunities, and those are met with the utmost enthusiasm — because as Bob Ross always explained, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”
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“Getting involved in PPA, along with my state and local photography organizations, was a game changer for me. I love being an active part of the photography community,” Hoyt says. “I learned so much from entering images into the various competitions and getting feedback from jurors as to what worked.”
Hoyt produced many of the cover images for TulsaKids magazine, a very high-profile venture for her business and one that was personally rewarding for her. In addition, producers of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover” asked Hoyt to create portraits of a family during a segment of the show filmed in Tulsa that were then used throughout the remodeled house on the episode. “It was such a fun experience,” she says.
Hoyt has taken even more diverse art classes, and she explains, “I’ve been playing with all kinds of traditional art materials and processes like acrylics, watercolor, encaustic wax, and am also experimenting with a variety of ways to print my photos.”
Leslie says, “In my photography, I was very technical, controlled all aspects of my process and worked hard to make everything perfect. The biggest thing I learned by working with these other art materials is that, as Bob Ross said, there are lots of ‘happy accidents’!”
For Leslie Hoyt, life changes and so shall she. She says, “You learn that how you react to it is the biggest challenge.”
Photographs:
Hoyt Backyard — Taken by Leslie Hoyt and used from her FB page — per her permission
Hoyt Workshop — Photograph by Marlys Cervantes
Leslie Hoyt — Current photograph of the artist provided by her, taken in her backyard
Oklahoma Photographer magazine cover; Photographer Magazine cover; series of 4 TulsaKids magazine covers (all cover photographs by Leslie Hoyt) — Photographs by Marlys Cervantes
#1-6 are all some of her professional photographs and mixed media works with the titles on them, if I know more, I’ll put it below:
3 Forgotten Beauty is an antique mannequin that she found and then used flowers on it for photographs. I fell in love with this photograph and its uniqueness.
4 Iced Tulips were actually frozen and then lovely as they defrosted somehow. She just tries all kinds of things.
5 A unique collage
6 “Cyanotypes are one of the oldest photographic printing processes. I mixed two chemicals that, when combined, are sensitive to UV light. I painted that emulsion on paper, placed plants on top and exposed it in the sunlight. In this case, I also added a little vinegar and pigment. It is always a surprise to see how it turns out!”
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