L E S T O N P E C K
A WASTE IS
A TERRIBLE THING TO MIND
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Leston was born in San Francisco and studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In the last week of his junior year, his education was interrupted by two serious accidents - first a car and later a motorcycle accident. Near the end of a long recovery he bought the return half of a British student's ticket to London and spent six months exploring Europe and North Africa. To return home, he needed to find work. He had met a Danish artist in Spain who wrote letters of reference, with which he found a job in Copenhagen, where he produced drawings for an architect. With sufficient funds, he booked passage on a freighter from Bristol, England, to Canada and docked in Montreal. Heading west to Alberta, he crossed down into the US at Montana with 26¢ in his pocket. He worked in the oil fields around the Shelby area for about four months and then headed south to Denver and then west to home.
By year's end, Leston returned to Berkeley and enrolled at San Francisco State University, three years and four months after the accidents. While a student, he worked part time at a local art bronze foundry, pursued odd jobs at free-lance illustration, model making, pattern making, and graphic design, and attended the San Francisco School of Holography. Having entered as an interdisciplinary art major, he graduated with a BA in cinematography and a minor in animation.
After graduation, Leston spent two decades at a research and development lab, working in support of science and technology. Hired as an animation specialist, he began on hand-painted cells, filmed on a 16mm Arriflex, then on to an Oxberry Stand, and then worked on computer animation. Work also included airbrush renderings, technical illustrations, and model making. The wide variety of projects encompassed the full range of methods and materials of the graphic and industrial arts. Contacts per job varied from one to 120 or more people and were coordinated with a broad spectrum of clients: program leaders, physicists, engineers, technicians, and support staff, including machinists, welders, and crafts people in the carpenter and paint shops.
Leston had a good measure of autonomy, but he grew increasingly discontent with the commercial arts. He was able to schedule a part time working plan and began taking painting classes. He won a juror's award from Mel Ramos, and in Berkeley at a national exhibition, he won juror's award from Robert Arneson, Elmer Bischoff, and Diana Fuller. This part time plan was not feasible and he returned to full time work until retirement. The skills developed over this commercial period allow him to accurately recreate the images in his notes and sketches, not through a sense of perfectionist determination, but by matching the feelings that attracted him to the images in the first place.