Leslie Gerry

My principal medium is the artists book, from which I also produce limited edition prints.
Architecture and the street life of a city fascinate me. I choose an unfamiliar place, spend 2-3 weeks of discovery, walking around, taking reference photos and sketching. That first exposure is so intense; with fresh eyes and heightened senses, you see things locals are often unaware of, which fade on subsequent visits.
Once back in my studio, a year of painting begins. With a stylus and Wacom tablet, I paint on the computer in Illustrator.  Working only with flat areas of colour (CMYK) and no tone, I “cut out” colour shapes with the stylus, arranging them on different layers, creating a collage. In fact, I first began working this way years ago (before developing my computer skills)  by cutting out sheets of coloured paper with scissors, similar to the way Matisse created his paper cut-outs. Matisse described it as “drawing with colour”. The paintings end up as digital files; vector images which can be reduced or enlarged to any size. Therefore there is no scanning, the files can be printed directly from the computer onto a mould-made paper, using a flat-bed UV inkjet printer. The images give a narrative to the book. My books are enormou...

I studied at Portsmouth Art College and Sydney College of Art, Australia illustration and graphics.