Growing up in a hotel, Leon Pericles didn’t have your usual upbringing. His early years were filled with sizing up daily new neighbours, creeping through the vast array of rooms and finding out a little bit too much about how to serve alcohol.

With his parents Dido (Arthur) and Enid managing the Grosvenor Hotel in East Perth in the mid-1950s, Leon was always finding new and strange people walking about his house.

From country types, to businessmen and miners, the Grosvenor appealed to everyone, and it is there Leon got to test the waters with his talent.

Always artistically inclined, and a bit bored with his parents always busy with the bar or tending to guests, Leon made his own fun by taking over the hotel’s interior decorating.

“There was limited artwork on the wall, but there were framed advertisements for wine, cigarettes and airlines,” he tells Neos Kosmos.

“I can remember sliding the cardboard out and painting over them and putting them back into the frame.”

“So I had an exhibition from the very first years of my life.”

Influenced by big epic movies like Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, Leon would paint different worlds, giving himself a chance to escape the rigid reality of hotel rural life.

He’d be confronted with travellers all his childhood life, but never get to travel with his parents always busy tending to guests.

His thirst for art never left him, and after switching into a technical school for the last years of High School, Leon started forming his own artistic voice.

Now at the age of 65, Leon is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and collected artists, with galleries all across Australia exhibiting his work. He is still one of the most prolific and hardest working artists to this day, swapping from three studios in his home of Western Australia to seek inspiration.

His work is truly one of a kind, many times taking the audience on a journey with him, expressing bite sized narratives with hidden details.

He can never just sit with one medium; he’s a jack of all trades. He’s most known for his prints, his paintings and his collages, but is very adept at being a sculptor and designer.

When an idea strikes, he revels in choosing the right medium to display the thought.

“I love it all, I move from one medium to the next,” he says.

“My topics move right across the full gamut, from abstract to realism, and storytelling with narratives running through my work.”

Some of the most unique work he does is using printmaking and etchings. He keeps his work true to the artform, sticking to early methods used by the first printmakers.

“It’s an antique method of printing, it was invented in the 17th century, and nothing’s changed,” he reveals.

“I produce the artwork exactly the same as Rembrandt or Dura would have done.”

Don’t think printmaking is just setting up a couple of type sets and getting some paper and ink. There’s no huge machine that churns out the same piece of work for the masses.

Fine art printmaking is a whole other world.

“The general public gets quite confused about printing and printmaking,” he says.

“Fine art printmaking means it’s got to be hand-made, so there might be a machine involved, but the machine is hand-wound, and the plates are hand-
drawn, and they’re not photocopied or photographed or reproduced.”

His etchings are abstract, which keep audiences uncovering new dimensions. In Headspace, 12 grey heads have their brains sliced open, showing just what makes their brain tick inside, whether it is the love of sport, the written word or music.

The art of collage is something Leon has toyed with from the start, and says it’s an artform to which many don’t give enough respect.

“Collages have the capacity to enrich the texture of an artwork and bring in another new medium altogether,” he says.

“In some cases I get a little bit upset when somebody sticks a photo of a person and then paints around it and the public then looks at it and they think the artist has painted the face, and I think that’s the unfortunate side of collage.”

In the etching/collage, My God’s better than yours, alongside religious tokens like icons and statues, a huge etching of an imagined world takes pride of place, where different denominations have their churches right next to each other.

The work engages the audience much more with the use of tokenistic everyday religious paraphernalia making a stark contrast against the untouched written scriptures.

For many of Leon’s works, a satirical aspect creeps through. Rural humour and the harsh reality of rural life is a subject close to his heart. Some pieces, like the tongue-in-cheek Some of Picasso’s Better Looking Acquaintances will have a smirk appearing on anyone’s face. It satirises the art industry, with
abstract faces like the ‘expensive girlfriend’ and the ‘nude life model’ making quite an impression.

As an artist for over 40 years, Leon has had something that many artists haven’t been able to keep. Staying power.

Like many that have come before him and after him, a stint in teaching is a must to keep a steady income flowing, and for Leon, that stint was a very small one.

He has been very fortunate to keep his artist’s hat much longer than his teacher hat. He decided to quit teaching and pursue his work full time for the larger part of his career.

“It’s a pretty scary thing to do, to suddenly stop your main source of income, but my wife and I were very happy with the income I was getting from my art and so I did it full-time.”

He remembers fast-tracking fine art teaching in schools, when unpopular arts like bead work, weaving and china painting were favoured.

“I went in and I started painting, I started life drawing, sculpture and printmaking, so I was part of the very first fine art based teachers that went out into
secondary schools,” he says.

Maybe the reason Leon has been able to pursue his work so freely is that ideas never dry up.

He has more than 25 diaries with all his ideas and sketches, for things he needs to remember and for ideas he knows aren’t just there yet.

He’s come to the conclusion that there’s just no way he’ll be able to fully realise many of these ideas with the amount of time that’s left to him.

“There are so many ideas and concepts that are in these books that I’ll never have time to do them,” he says.

“You realise that your ambitions for your life’s work can’t be completed.”

If that’s Leon’s only regret, then that’s a life well lived.

For more information on Leon Pericles and the galleries where his work is exhibited, visit www.leonpericles.com.au