Artist Spotlight: Doug Leed
Artist Spotlight: Doug Leed
Doug Leed is an established artist of psychedelic imagery based in Columbus, Ohio. Leed’s specialties include painting, digital and macro photography, fractalization, and video projection. During his live art projection performances, he also performs on synthesizers to create mind-bending multimedia soundscapes of kaleidoscopic psychedelia.
Doug Leed
Since childhood, Doug Leed has always had an interest in art and music. As a kid he loved to draw and paint, even creating his own bunch of comic characters, as well as spending hours upon hours listening to 70s AM radio on his clock radio. Continuing with these interests through high school, he started formally honing his skills of design and layout while studying architecture at Miami University.
College is also where Doug joined his first band Lack of Motivation, an acoustic act in which he rotated between playing guitar, singing both lead and backing vocals, and playing hand percussion. After college, Leed moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1993 and continued to play in multiple alternate rock bands while often running live sound, recording and engineering for himself and others, and drawing and painting.
Doug Leed
In the early 2000s, Leed further honed his art and computer skills by taking several multimedia production technology classes at Columbus State Community College. As digital photography became more prevalent on phones, Doug started focusing more on this medium as his main form of art. He enjoys starting with macro photography and natural fractal patterns and adding layers of filters on top to create psychedelic digital imagery where the original imagery is unrecognizable.
Doug Leed
Around the time of the pandemic, a few local bands began asking him to project some slideshows of his imagery work at their performances. Leed then began to create trippy videos to sprinkle in with his slideshows and sometimes the bands would request him to project his work directly on them during shows, like Andy Warhol used to do at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
It was also around this time that Doug musically transitioned from alternative rock to improvised electronic soundscaping. He primarily plays synthesizers through effects and loopers, to create swirling aural landscapes that evolve and morph into unexplored spaces.
In addition to performing solo, Doug Leed currently plays in Nyctalopia, micro, Phase Transmissions, the Radical Left, and Chrone of the Wildwood. He also takes part in a couple of monthly series S.T.A.T.I.C., an experimental music group that encourages artists to challenge themselves and push themselves outside of their comfort zone, and Chamber Poetry, a rotating cast of musicians improvises music behind poets reading their work. Leed often performs and projects his live art at The Fuse Factory, where he is also a board member.
Doug Leed
