Career
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Leiteritz produced her "painted diagrams", which drew heavily from the scientific articles and books in her care (she was a professional librarian before becoming a painter). Leiteritz"s paintings typically reworked a mundane graph using large expanses of colour and a bold abstract theme, into a dynamic painting. Other works are reminiscent of a Bunsen burner flame or a deoxyribonucleic acid gel.
One of her most famous paintings, "Crossing at the Left Border" (1966.
Oil on linen), appeared on the cover of the catalogue for an art exhibition in Chicago in 1969. This painting is known to have been inspired by a specific graph appearing in an otherwise unremarkable paper of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering Journal.
Her work has much in common with that of Paul Klee.