"I'm always looking for a challenge and for some way to surprise people both with my work and in day-to-day conversation," says Lesley, who first began his artistic path as a child dreaming up and drawing cartoon characters in front of the TV on Saturday mornings. That penchant for delivering the unexpected developed during this time, with a chance visit to his then-teenage cousin Brenda's bedroom.
"Brenda was a hippie chick and I was just in awe of her," Lesley says, recalling black lights, velvet posters, fluorescent painted flowers and dark Christmas lights that lent something of a hallucinatory glow to the space. "She hung those black light posters diagonally and they always seemed so chaotic, but at the same time in perfect placement. What I saw in that room was always very inspirational to me."
Refusing to Step Aside
Lesley learned early on that making a living as an artist was within his grasp. By third grade, he had gone into business, selling marker drawings door-to-door to neighbors and fetching $20 each for his images of tigers, dragons, early Christian saints and Greek mythological characters. It proved quite the financial haul for a seven-year-old and served to develop a fiercely independent mindset.
Largely self-taught, Lesley honed his fine arts talents throughout high school and landed multiple state, national and Congressional awards. Before graduating, he had landed two major placements of his art via contests: His pencil drawing of a barnacle-covered seashell hung in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for a year, and a piece titled "Skulls and Shells," featuring a cow's skull leaning against an artist's sketch, hung in the Rotunda hall of the Capital Buiilding in Washington, D.C.
In 1994, Lesley entered the Tampa Technical Institute, where studied commercial art and continued to sweep awards shows.
"I was winning contests like crazy," Lesley says. "So my teachers asked if I would back out of contests and give some of the other students a chance." So did he? "No, of course not."
Returing to his Roots
Next came a bachelor's degree in Illustration from Sarasota's renowned Ringling School of Art and Design, where be befriended Jesse Hansen, considered among the top artists in the comic book industry. That connection led to Lesley's work being published inside and on the covers of six comic books beginning in 2004. In 2006, he switched gears to sculpting, working for Creative Environs, a St. Augustine, Fla. company that creates interactive exhibits for amusement parks, museums, casinos, etc.
Late 2008, Lesley decided it was time to return to his fine arts roots. He left Creative Environs and since has created and sold works on his own and through The Artistree, a popular Atlantic Beach, Fla. gallery owned by fellow artist William Meyer. A 2009 exhibit featured varied works by Lesley including watercolor seascapes, and scultures inspired by archaelogical findings and featuring elephants, dinosaurs and dragons. This scupture series was inspired by China's and India's continued economic growth, as America experiences one of its toughest recessions.
"The elephant is representative of India and the greater reptiles represent China," Lesley explains. "More than popular subjects of art work, they are cultural icons that represent wealth and power."
Conveying a Message
Much of Lesley's work belies his intricate knowledge of science and history, as well as the depth of his Christian convictions. Shelves in his studio are lined not with books on art, but with books on archaelogy, paleontology, spirituality and histories of various cultures and peoples including the Native Americans. Among them are titles like Red Earth, White Lies, the Vine Deloria, Jr. book that debunks the long-held theory that Native Americans arrived in North America by way of the Bering land bridge, instead citing archaeological and geological clues that the continent's earliest inhabitants arrived by transoceanic travel and helping to develop the belief in Native American Creationism.
Lesley feels a kindred spirit with the likes of Deloria. As early as six years old, he quietly but defiantly questioned his own science teachers and today remains skeptical of government-run education.
"As kids, we were given the impression that plants added to the surface of the earth without taking anything from it, suggesting that the earth was growing in size like an organism," he says. "Even at age six, that just didnt' sound plausible to me. I believe that the same matter that's in plants and trees today has always existed in the ground. It's just being drawn up and recycled."
Lesley hopes to use his art as a way to help "make the truth as readily available as the mistakes," he says.
Devan Stuart - Devan Stuart is a longtime journalist and five-time Florida Press Association Award winner.
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