I'm Leah Beach, and I’m an artist.
I've been making things my whole life. It started with photography, then chalkboards for local businesses, and somewhere along the way, I became the go-to mural person at the Delaware Beaches. Hospital units, custom bar doors, and the side of entire hotels. Big walls, weird spaces (like the Haunted Mansion at Funland!), projects I'm genuinely proud of.
These days, Im figuring out what to paint next. As my life has stabilized, I've realized that creating for businesses never brought me the same joy as creating for myself. So that's what I'm doing now.
Murals were always the "in-between."
The thing I squeezed in to make the cash flow work. Creating for other people's spaces, on other people's timelines, with my body paying the tab.
In 2021, a children's oncology unit at a military hospital in Bethesda needed help transforming the beige walls that kids had to stare at all day. The catch was, I couldn't actually paint on the walls. So I created paintings that were scanned into decals, and a massive wallpaper background. It took two years, with a ton of red tape and unexpected challenges. We pulled it off, and it's one of my greatest accomplishments to date.
This project showed me that it was never about the medium. Creating these animals for these children, and problem-solving the impossible logistics, brought me more joy than any wall I'd ever painted.
I love creating animals.
When I painted the animals for the hospital, something clicked. For the first time, a client handed me a subject and trusted me completely. Just me, the animal, and however long it took to get it right.
That's what painting animals feels like when it's really mine. I sketch directly onto birch wood, build up layers of acrylic, and use color the way most people use shadow by swirling light and dark until something alive shows up on the canvas.
With my life finally balancing out, I get to choose what I create and how much of myself I put into it. That means I no longer take on murals for businesses, or commissions outside my signature style. Only the work that's fully mine.
Which means the animals you see here are exactly that. If you want me to create one for you, let me know!
I am so proud of this work.
These murals represent a chapter I'm genuinely proud of. Every wall, every weird space, every project that pushed me further than I thought I could go.
I spent years painting walls for other people. I loved it, it broke me a little, and I'd do most of it again.
I'm not taking on mural commissions for new clients at this time.
Thank you to every person who invested in my work along this journey,
What I’m Creating Now
Honestly? Right now the paintbrushes are in other people's hands.
Through Purpose in Progress, I've found a different kind of making… one that's less about what I produce and more about what happens in the room when other people create. That's where my energy lives right now.
But something is stirring. I've been spending a lot of time looking at abstract work lately. Feeling pulled toward something that has no brief, no client, no reference photo. Just color and instinct and whatever comes out.
I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. But that's kind of the point.