Leonard Koscianski (b. 1952) is a painter whose often surreal imagery explores the tension between beauty, danger and the natural world. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he earned his B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1977 and M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1979, where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud and served as his teaching assistant. Koscianski developed a distinctive approach to representational painting, combining dramatic lighting, saturated color and exaggerated scale to transform familiar subjects into unsettling images. His early drawings of oversized tools suggested the potential for violence concealed within everyday objects, while his later paintings of animals, suburban landscapes and domestic scenes evoke the uneasy relationship between humans and nature. Koscianski received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1989. His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Orange County Museum of Art and is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art.