Leslie M. Ficcaglia, a member of the American Society of Portrait Artists, has been an artist for as long as she can recall. As a child she carried a sketchbook with her and took every opportunity to draw the people and objects she encountered. Largely self-taught, she attended life classes at The Art Students’ League while a student at New York University and more recently studied landscape painting with Glenn Rudderow, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to learn oil techniques. This experience with landscapes is evident in the backgrounds she uses for her oil portraits. While she is proficient with more formal studies as well, her specialty is “Portraits in a Natural Setting” and she often depicts her subjects out-of-doors, in settings which are meaningful to them. Painting in her studio overlooking the Wild and Scenic Manumuskin River in rural Port Elizabeth, in southern New Jersey, Ficcaglia normally works from her own photographs. She finds that using photos as her reference material enables her to achieve fresher and more spontaneous facial expressions than would be possible if her subjects were asked to pose for long periods of time, and the warmth and sense of personality she is able to convey have become a trade- mark of her work.