Lead Pencil joins Red: Family reflects on life of beloved Harrington’s Leslie LePere, the artist who also farmed
On a table in the Saranac Art Gallery, which was displaying the work of late artist Leslie LePere from Feb. 7 to March 1, sister Louise Kodis paused at a tin containing at least one hundred rainbow decal stickers, with a note above labeled “Take One.”
“When he was still just at the end of Seattle, he and some friends published these rainbows, and made thousands of them,” Kodis, also an artist, said. “I don’t know if they ever sold very many … take one!”
Unlike the rainbow decal in her hand, Kodis, a fabric artist, was dressed in nearly monochrome olive green: corduroy pants, a sweater and a statement necklace. Her turtleneck was burnt orange. Also on the table was the book “Craft in America.” She opened it to the page that was bookmarked.
“Red Pencil was Ken Cory, and when he and Les were living in Seattle and Ellensburg and they were doing collaborative work and enjoying high jinks again,” Kodis said. “One day, Red said, ‘We could be the Pencil Brothers! You could be lead pencil and I’ll be red pencil, and it’s better to be red than dead’ … or something like that.”
Cory and LePere met as undergrads at Washington State University, where Kodis attended ahead of her little brother. Kodis pointed at a picture of one of their collaborations in the book, which had been displayed at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. LePere and his group in Seattle had a clear artistic vision that ran counter to the predominant trend at the time – abstract expressionism. Though he experimented with other mediums in school, LePere’s primary tools were pencils.
In a 2018 article for The Spokesman-Review, LePere said, “An appreciation for recognizable subject matter is my underpinning, my foundation, my cat’s meow. That’s the flag that I fly! There’s some abstract art I like, don’t get me wrong, but we (the Pencil Brothers) were reacting to the abstract works we thought didn’t deserve so much acclaim,” LePere added. “Frankly, some abstracts were real yawners.”
During his time in Seattle, LePere was teaching art classes at the now-defunct Factory of Visual Arts while his work was being displayed in what was then the Margolis Gallery. There, it was seen by the late author, Tom Robbins, who commissioned LePere to create many of his book covers.
“Tom was fascinated by the work,” Kodis said. “And about that time, Tom had written ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ and ‘Still Life with Woodpecker.’ And he went to Les, and he said, ‘I want you to do the covers.’ There’s a fun review Tom wrote about one of Les’ shows, and it’s in the other room.”
The review was to the left of a picture of Kodis and LePere when they were children, as well as a picture of LePere in his studio at the farm.
In “Cover Story,” Robbins wrote: “In terms of content, our artist is a playful, eclectic spirit, rearranging the American Dream according to his own fun-loving but nonetheless penetrating vision. That is Lead Pencil, the perpetrator of visual puns, the introspective comedian. But as Les LePere, the more sedate alter-ego, what sets him apart, makes him worthy of our serious attention, is his gift for reductive rendering and more importantly, his talent for formal composition.”
Kodis said aesthetics started for both of them on the wheat farm where they grew up, in Harrington.
“Our parents really loved us and encouraged us to be active and involved and that was primarily on the farm, but if we wanted to draw, there was always pencil and paper and crayons,” Kodis said. “Our parents loved the land, and so we learned to love it, too. There’s beauty in that, and you carry it in you somehow. And for him, it came out in pencils.”
Though many notice the concentration on objects in LePere’s work, it also strongly features rural landscapes as the backdrop. He credited Harrington with forming his aesthetic vision.
“I think maybe growing up on the farm, where form follows function, had a great deal to do with it,” LePere told the Spokesman-Review in 2013. “I found myself falling in love with objects and shapes and recognizable things. To me, each of those recognizable things has a life, a karma, almost a philosophy of its own – thus magic.”
In 1980, LePere received a phone call from their father, Kodis said. He was tired of driving the tractor. LePere made the decision to return to Harrington.
“Even though, in retrospect, he said, ‘Well, it’s obvious, I can do both,’ it was hard for him to leave Seattle and his circle of friends there,” Kodis said.
She said LePere returned to work the farm out of family obligation – due to traditional gender roles, her parents didn’t have those expectations for her – and because he was worried about supporting himself financially solely as an artist.
In a story previewing his 2013 retrospective “Magic of the Objects” at the Jundt Art Museum, he told the paper, “It surprised me that I was able to accomplish that much having a full-time job farming, and it absolutely put a smile on my face and a song in my heart, to know that I was able to combine both loves and passions.”
LePere’s relationship to farming was more complicated than it appeared, and art was his true love. Kodis believed her brother wasn’t great at marketing himself, and if he had, things might have been different.
“I think he would have sustained himself as an artist and he wouldn’t have had to be a farmer at the same time,” Kodis said. “Now, I don’t think he really wanted to go back to the farm. I mean, he knew it. He knew what to do. He knew how to farm.”
According to those who loved him, LePere, the man, was a lot of things. He had a large personality, a distinct sense of humor, a knack for storytelling, was a snazzy dresser and a gourmand who enjoyed entertaining. Comfortable in a crowd, he still preferred to communicate one on one. Growing up, the family had elaborate dinners on the farm, a tradition both Kodis and LePere carried into their adult homes.
“Something that was difficult for me, but just part of Les’ personality, he would invite extra people without telling me,” Kodis said. “So, I have a big table, 9 feet long, but sometimes it was a little more than full, or it was a birthday party for him outside, and he would invite six or eight extra people. But they worked.”
Louise’s daughter, Chemyn Kodis, remembered her uncle sticking out to her even when she was a child.
“He wasn’t particularly, we’ll say, fluent with children,” Chemyn said. “He didn’t have any of his own and I don’t think he spent a lot of time with kids, so he didn’t know quite what you were supposed to do, so in a way, that made him even more interesting because he didn’t follow any sort of structural rules and more spoke with you as though you were a grown adult.”
When she was older, Chemyn remembered smoking cigarettes in her uncle’s studio on the farm – he swore he never smoked – drinking beers, baseball on the TV in the background and talking about art. When thinking about her own art, her uncle’s thoughts on composition are a voice in her head. She remembered the individual attention he paid her, and even if he didn’t agree with her, he considered what she had to say.
Chemyn recalled that LePere loved telling the story about going to New York to meet with Robbins’ publisher.
“He had met a friend in New York, and they were gonna take the train someplace just outside, that was about 40 minutes away,” Chemyn said. “And so they stopped in the market somewhere and got fresh shrimp and limes and just made a Ziploc bag of ceviche to cure the shrimp on the train ride, and then just ate it. He just loved to tell the story, just loved to talk about how all you needed was some fresh shrimp and some limes before you know it, you had a meal.”
Karen Kaiser, curator for education at the Jundt Art Museum, recalled going on a road trip with LePere to see a museum in Tieton, Washington, and stopping to get the best tamales.
“It was just a tiny little house, wasn’t even a restaurant,” Kaiser said. “I had asparagus tamales, which of course I’ve never had. They were delicious.”
The 2013 retrospective “Magic of the Objects” at the Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University displayed an incredible amount of LePere’s work from over the years – book covers, posters, commercial work, as well as his own compositions. Kaiser put together the retrospective, which took about a year.
“We got things from across the state, things from Seattle,” Kaiser said. “We had pieces that friends donated, we had like a half mannequin and so Louise did those with jewelry. It was called ‘Magic of the Objects’. We would always draw from life, which seems kind of strange, but he had hundreds and, well, probably thousands and thousands of small objects. And so we had two big cases full of just small objects that were his. We had several 6-by-6, drawings. He just kept bringing more and more things until I told him to stop because the gallery was just stuffed.”
During his last decade, LePere’s health wavered, and he retired. This allowed him a new focus to his art, as well as to his town. LePere became a cheerleader for Harrington. In fact, he had a showing at the Post and Office, what was then the new coffee shop in town, housed in the old post office building.
“You could barely get Wonder Bread and Vienna sausages in this town for a while there,” LePere told The Spokesman-Review. “The Slacks have injected good energy into Harrington and are contributing to a revitalization.”
Louise remembered visiting the building when they were kids, as well as collecting items from it when it went out of business. Louise took a scale that in an arch at the top says “Weight indicates your health” and if you put a penny in, it will weigh you. LePere took a wind-up wall clock, which he gave back to the Post and Office when it opened. Both Louise and LePere have an affinity for objects.
“It’s something we did share,” Louise said. “And I think his really got wound up in when he lived in Seattle, because there was a group of artists who really liked drawing and painting and emphasizing the objects.”
Chemyn naturally fell into the role of taking care of her uncle’s day-to-day tasks and business management. This was how the family learned that LePere was dealing with serious heart concerns. After a visit to the hospital, Chemyn offered her uncle her house to stay for the end of his life, where he remained until his death in August. During this time, he had many visits from friends from all over, and Chemyn put his artwork into digital files on a computer so he could look through his work.
Louise said her brother’s approach to his artwork could possibly be best described within the title of a book that was a retrospective on Cory: “Play Disguised,” which was published after Cory died in 1994.
“The more fun it was, the more important it was,” Kodis said.