Busy with his full-time role as the art and design teacher at Finchley's Christs College grammar school and equally busy bringing up a young family at his home in East Barnet, north London, my father found there was never the time nor space to create the larger works he always wanted to, limiting himself mainly to undertaking illustrative and heraldic commissions. But in the early 1960's the family dining room was converted into a studio and easels, palletes, brushes, lots of tubes of paints and all the paraphernalia of oil painting soon followed.
For him, painting was a pleasure and the walls of the house were soon covered in paintings of all sorts of subjects, sizes & styles. But two main themes began to emerge as the focus of his paintings - architectural and abstract - and gradually his works began to make their way out of the house to institutions and other homes. Public exhibitions in north London, the City of London and in the Midlands followed, encouraging Dad to think about giving up teaching art and instead 'doing it' as a working artist.
This soon became a reality - in the late Sixties his sister Thelma had moved from a Cardiff townhouse to a former farm near Aberporth and it was on a visit there that Leslies & Norma came across the Old School Studio in the nearby village of Blaenporth. Formerly the village primary school built in 1845, it had been converted a few years previously to a combined pottery and art studio with an attached gallery. And it was up for sale; the two owners were the potter May Greenup and the floral painter Elizabeth Bridge who were getting older and wanted to move back to the Cotswolds.
Things happened very quickly - with the children all away at boarding school or college, selling the London house was easy and so Leslie & Norma moved to Blaenporth in 1973. Leslie still continued to teach in Finchley, staying with a friend during school term-time and driving down to Blaenporth every Friday night and returning on Sunday night. In 1974 at the age of 60, he finally retired early from teaching and was able to spend all of his time in the studio.
When we moved there we soon discovered quite a lot of work was needed to the property - parts of the original Victorian wooden floors in what used to be the classrooms, one of which was now the studio, had rotted and collapsed into the ground and for a while it was all hands on deck to remove the old floors and replace them with solid concrete. But once the remedial works had been completed, Leslie started paintiing again, the gallery soon filled with fresh works and opening to the public, attracted visitors both local and those who were on holiday along the nearby coasts.
Following his death in 1975 my mother Norma picked up his paint brushes and carried on, creating her own distinctive works until approaching 80 years of age, she sold the studio & gallery and moved back to the village she was born, Hawarden in north Wales.