J.M. STRINGER GALLERY

J. Geoffrey Leckie was born in Buffalo, New York and spent his early years in Rutherford and then Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. He studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. With some sound advice from his design instructor he fled north to New York City and The Art Student's League. There he enrolled in courses with Robert Beverly Hale, Sidney Dickinson and, principally, Frank Mason with whom he studied seven years. He then embarked on a series of trips which were to take him as far a field as Maine, Ireland, Nova Scotia, the American West, Italy, Scotland, France, Switzerland and Transylvania, Romania. In 2000 he and his wife Elizabeth moved to Venice, Italy, where they live today and from where he has gone further a field to paint in India, Morocco, Syria and Vietnam.

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Venice, as for so many painters, has been an inspiration since his first trip in 1986. His paintings are characterized by an overwhelming interest in the effects of light and atmosphere, where a personal response to the variety of his landscape depends not so much on architectural exactness as a poetic and allegorical approach to his subjects.

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In 2014, Leckie completed an Indian painting trip which began in the lovely old city of Mysore. He then continued to a nature preserve full of leopards, elephants, wild boar, wonderful birds, crocodiles and a few tigers which were not seen, only heard. After that, he traveled to Coorg and stayed on a coffee plantation where they grow, of course, coffee but also cardamon, black pepper and a large variety of fruits such as mango. Finally, he headed to the beach of Neeleshwar in Kerala where, in his opinion, he did his best work.