Printmaker Lesley Anne Numbers finds fulfillment through a blend of teaching and making art in the Madison Community
In 2013, Lesley Anne Numbers, a bubbly art teacher with light blue eyes, was pregnant, restless and ready to take the biggest risk in her career so far; while other expecting mothers might opt for stability, for her, pregnancy was a driving force to seek the opposite. She taught children’s art classes at Monroe Street Art Center, a nonprofit organization in Madison, her hometown, and she loved how it gave her the opportunity to encourage passion, spark creativity and show students that it’s okay — important even — to mess up sometimes. But Numbers realized that by exclusively teaching, she was suppressing her desire to make her own art and put it into the world — something she had been passionate about her whole life. From drawing anti-littering posters as a small child and hanging them up all over her west side neighborhood to convincing her high school art teachers to let her convert a school closets into a dark room so she could screenprint T-shirts and posters for her friends’ bands, Numbers always aimed to give something to the community through her art.
“I want my daughter to feel supported and courageous enough to pursue what she feels like her purpose is,” Numbers thought. “How can my daughter do that if I’m not doing that?”
Amidst this pregnant contemplation, Numbers finally read “Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit,” a book she’d had for seven years before cracking it open. Written by Corita Kent, a radical Catholic nun who taught screen printing at a California college in the ’60s, and one of Kent’s former students, Jan Steward, the book preaches that facing fears and going in new directions are the keys to freeing the creative spirit.
“Maybe I should actually do what she’s telling me,” Numbers recalled thinking at the time. Back then, she was just a budding version of the artist she is today—one who has had great success in printmaking and selling her work, and who continues to inspire others through the a lively classes she teaches at Madison’s Art + Literature Laboratory, a hub for the creative community that offers classes and exhibitions relating to visual, literary and performing arts.
Just a year before she arrived at this pregnancy prompted crossroads, Numbers graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in art education from UW–Madison. In the fine art field, being a teacher was often touted as the only way to secure a form of stable income —especially in a city like Madison where residents generally didn’t shell out thousands of dollars on art. It was risky to rely on making art as part of your income, but, as it turns out, you cannot free the creative spirit by playing it safe.
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Less than a year later, with an infant daughter at home, Numbers found herself in a cavernous room peppered with relatively small — but extremely heavy — printing presses. She enrolled at Madison College with a special student status, taking classes to refine her printmaking skills. Printmaking is the process of transferring images from a surface like linoleum or wood onto another surface like paper or fabric; Numbers says she was drawn to printing because of its political roots and collaborative dynamic. Printmaking became associated with political movements because of the ease with which it could reproduce messages and designs connected to a cause and the collaborative element, Numbers explained, was largely a result of the big expensive equipment required for printing making it both easier and more cost-effective to work with other artists. The art form seemed like a natural pivot for Numbers, especially since she already had some experience with the medium—in addition to her high school screen printing endeavors, Numbers took a screen printing class as an undergrad and learned various printmaking techniques through an apprenticeship.
One of Numbers’s print-making projects at Madison College was a warm-toned Dolly Parton-inspired design, which featured the singer’s famous big-haired outline along with black lettering that proclaimed, “Dolly wants you to pour yourself a cup of ambition.” Numbers got the idea for the print while listening to one of Parton’s interviews.
“Dolly is the best,” she thought. “There should be more Dolly tribute art in the world.”
So she set out to create a piece that paid homage to “Dolly, coffee and mid-century kitchenware,” as she explained on the Etsy listing for the print.
One of her instructors, Jim McKiernan, with dark glasses and a grayish goatee had been printmaking since the ’60s, and in his 10 years working at the college, helped to build up their print center. Jim recalled seeing Numbers’ Parton print and thinking, “Oh, wait a minute.”
“What you’re doing is different from what other people are doing right now, you could just sell these,” McKiernan told her.
“I don’t know,” Numbers coyly replied
“I think you need to start doing that,” he said.
The piece, “Dolly Wants You!,” would go on to launch Numbers’ small business and art-making dreams, she explained on Etsy.
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Numbers spent 2019, the first year of working toward her MFA in printmaking from UW–Madison, trying to let go. During her time at Madison College, she honed in on a unique print style that garnered a lot of support and a steady-ish income. While she was earning her MFA, though, she had to put that style aside, as her professors challenged her to make art that was less crafty and kitschy.
“I just need to take my own advice and be vulnerable and open to experimentation,” Numbers told herself. She had spent her career giving advice like this to her students, and this moment forced her to take it herself; as Numbers’s first foray into woodblock printing, she had to test the bounds of the medium to learn what she could achieve with it.
Much of her art began with words—song lyrics, poems or quotes—and for this woodblock print, Numbers found inspiration in a mantra stuck in her head at the time: “give and receive,” from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a nonfiction bestseller about the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature.
Once she had that framework, the imagery started coming—specifically, it came while she was walking her dogs on Madison’s scenic foot trails. Numbers had four dogs, each with a whimsical name like Lucky Dream and Misty Moo. Unable to walk them all at once, she and her partner often teamed up or went separately in shifts, allowing Numbers to divide her attention between her hyper huskies and the natural beauty all around her. While walking the dogs, Numbers saw the message “give and receive” repeated over and over in the plants she spotted along the path, including strawberry, rose, borage and calendula. The plants invoked Kimmerer’s teachings of giving back to the earth, which has given us such beautiful surroundings.
Numbers photographed these plants, animals and landscapes, to put together a rough sketch of the piece. Getting started was the hardest part; she tended to put things off until it was almost painful. But when she finally got to work, inspired by a stroke of creative genius, the pressure of a looming deadline or both, the art flowed out of her. Lesley often created at her home studio — a fancy title to mask the fact that she was making art at the dining room table — while listening to a playlist of songs connected to the print, eliciting an immersive and artistic headspace.
Woodblock printing is a subset of relief printing, which means an artist carves out negative space from a surface, leaving only the shapes they want to show up in the print. So, after she finished sketching out the elements, Numbers transferred her drawing onto a woodblock and used a gouge — an aptly named knife-like tool — to carve out sections of the block. Once carved, she grabbed a brayer — a tool that looks like an American Girl doll-sized paint roller — and spread the ink onto the block. Finally, she pressed the inked woodblock onto the paper. This part of the process required a roller press — a giant machine resembling a rolling pin slightly suspended above a table. Using a machine instead of sheer arm strength ensured that each intricate flower petal or follicle of bunny fur got fully printed onto the paper. The piece was a multi-layer reduction print; after pressing each section into the paper, Numbers carved away new details, reinked the woodblock with a different color, and repeated the printing process seven times.
From a phrase to photos to a sketch to its final form “Give and Receive,” which was more than half the size of Numbers herself, depicted human hands bearing fruit for two bunnies alongside vivid orange, yellow and green flowers. In 2024, the final piece was chosen as the Dane Art’s Art Poster of the year, an award showcasing a talented local artist each year, with the organization making the piece available as a poster that people can pick up at various Madison locations, including the City-County Building downtown.
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It was the night before the 2024 presidential election, and the dribbling rain and daylight savings darkness did not make anyone at the Arts + Literature Laboratory feel any better.
“The energy tonight is very odd with election day and the weather, so we’ll see who shows up,” Numbers told the two students who trickled in, adding that she also wouldn’t have left her house tonight either if she didn’t have to. Numbers was teaching the third session of an introductory class on relief printmaking, which familiarizes students with making prints using both linoleum and wood blocks. Held at the Arts + Lit Lab, a community-driven, artist-run interdisciplinary arts center where Numbers started teaching in fall of 2024, this course was created to increase the intro-level art classes available to adults in the Madison area.
Lesley’s art class attire consisted of a striped white and mustard long-sleeve top, magenta Chelsea boots and some acid wash overalls, with one back pocket sprouting a pencil and, the other, her bright yellow phone.. The outfit was accessorized with a shoulder-length shag-esque hairdo, tattoos peeking out of her sleeves and colorful heart-shaped earrings — almost as big as the organ itself.
As 6 p.m. approached, Numbers laid out plastic trays of gouges, ink and her students’ engraved linoleum blocks. This was just a fraction of the art supplies stored in the classroom; the walls were lined with shelves of air-dry clay, sponges, watercolors and milk crates holding piles of paper. Student after student entered the classroom, taking their places at a long table covered in brown paper. As the chairs filled up, the scene looked more and more like the Last Supper — that is, if instead of discussing betrayal the apostles were printing on tea towels and instead of meeting in Jerusalem, they were in a recently constructed building off East Washington St. Despite Numbers’ concerns, by 6:05 pm, eight out of nine students were present, so she began class with a vote — not just because voting was the big thing on everyone’s mind that night, but because three weeks into the four-week class, students were at varying levels of completion with their printing projects. Lesley asked each student to share where they’re at in the process; It took a few seconds for the first student to think of her answer, and the room was silent aside from the hum of the building’s central air.
“I’m pretty flexible, I guess I would say,” she eventually said.
“I am working on designing a woodblock,” the next student said.
“I want to print on the towel,” said Kay Voight, a student with short blond hair protruding from a white beanie. Three more students concur.
“Okay, so I think we’ll focus on printing on the towels today,” Numbers said. “Folks who want to print on fabric, come on over.”
All eight students followed Numbers to a table toward the back of the concrete floored classroom. Numbers spent 20 minutes demonstrating the linocut printing process — which is almost identical to woodblock printing, except the designs have been carved into a linoleum block instead of wood, and there was no machine, leaving students to rely on their brute strength to press their designs into fabric.
With the demo done, students were free to work individually on their projects to the tune of tacky ink and the music of Haley Henricks, a female folk singer that one student requested they listen to.
Voight, a 26-year-old in black and white plaid pants, used a deep blue ink to transfer her hand-sized fish design onto a wrinkled white tea towel. The aquatic animal was her muse for one simple reason: “I thought they’d look cool on a tea towel,” she said.
Voight had freshly moved to Madison for a reporting job and was trying out new activities to acquaint herself with the city and its occupants. She saw a post advertising Numbers’ class on the Art + Lit Lab Instagram account; it was an easy choice for Voight to sign up, since she’s already tried printing on her own, with varying degrees of success. She was grateful for the class because it showed her the correct way of doing things, and she found Numbers’ individual assistance and endless supply of tips and tricks to be extremely helpful in the process.
Numbers saw Voight press her linoleum block onto the towel and walked over to offer some advice.
“A little more pressure,” Numbers instructed, with hips slightly cocked and hands tucked into her back pockets.
“Maybe a little more ink too,” she added.
But Numbers was quickly pulled away from Voight, faced with a seemingly endless array of questions from students all around the room.
“Is there a way of getting the excess ink back in the container?”
“Do you think this is enough ink?”
“Hey Lesley, do you know the WIFI password?
Numbers answered effortlessly, with a warm smile and thoughtful suggestions.
“No,” Numbers giggled. “But if you want, you can do a paper print while you have it?”
“Hmm, maybe a little more.”
“I’ll write it on this whiteboard up here!”
Even with Numbers assistance, it became clear that most of the students would not be able to finish all of their printmaking projects by next Monday, the last session of the class. Since this was the maiden voyage of the class, Lesley was carefully paying attention to how its structure could be refined and evolved for future sessions; she’d definitely consider lengthening the class in the future.
“Not everyone here will be finished by next week, so just know that there’s an option to finish prints at a future date,” Numbers said, offering up time in her own studio space at Polka Press!, a printmaking collective near Madison’s East Side, for her class to complete their projects.
“That’s really good to know,” said a student with gray hair and a monochrome burnt orange outfit.
Numbers made time for this outside assistance, even with a busy and ever-changing schedule. She was helping a friend from high school produce a zine; they planned to collaborate on four editions a year, with the theme for this winter’s release being “Germinating Dreams of Community.” Numbers was also preparing for a gallery show slated for early 2025, for which she’d been collecting ideas in the Notes app of her phone for over a year. Not to mention, she had her curly-haired, now 11-year-old daughter to raise.
Lesley remembers meeting with a guidance counselor when she was around her daughter’s age, telling him about her career ambition of making art for the community.
“Most eighth graders don’t really have a sense of what they want to do, but I was like, “I want to be a mural painter, and I want to make art in the community.’” Lesley recalled.
The counselor went on to tell her that being a community artist was not a real job and that she should consider something more practical. Yet here she was, in her 30s, combining her passion for personal practice to feel creatively fulfilled with continued work teaching a few times a week, uplifting and encouraging other aspiring artists and finding a sense of mutual support with fellow creatives.
Numbers always had it in her back pocket that she could go back to teaching art full-time if her individual practice stopped generating a livable wage.
“But right now it keeps working out,” she said.
