George Lesniewicz didn't want to mail in his original work of art for the Alphabet Project; he wanted to bring the painting in himself. He couldn't wait to show his old colleagues at The Citizen what he'd done.
"Wow, how long did that take you?," asked one reporter as he carefully removed the art from its wrappings.
"About 55 years," he said nonchalantly.
His point was instantly taken. He may have applied brush to canvas for a matter of only a few hours, to come up with this collage, but any one work of art is the sum of all the lessons and experiences that form the life of the artist. Despite the many professions Lesniewicz has undertaken over his life, art has been a constant presence dating back to his childhood, and now that he is a full-time artist since workaday retirement, he was easily able to create a compelling image for his randomly selected spot in the alphabet.
G is certainly a strong letter in his own life, since it is his anglicized initial (he brought his birth name, Jerzy, with him from his Polish heritage when he emigrated with his family to Canada as a child). He also has a long and affectionate history with the city that shares his name (he moved here in 1970), and that's what his brush gravitated to, starting with the medium itself. He used oil paints, representative of the resource economy of the area, and he applied it to a wood panel representative of the forest industry and natural resources abundant in our region.
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
The images are a collection of familiar scenes from the history of the area. He has the original Cameron Street Bridge with the cutbanks in the background. He has the CN Rail bridge. There are telegraph poles. There's a sternwheeler. There is a field and there is a lakeshore.
The only touch of colour outside of the earth-tone palette he uses throughout the painting is the crisp blue he uses to emblazon the words Prince George Citizen on the little sign above the image of the 1916 original office of the newspaper that is, this year, celebrating its centennial with this very Alphabet Project.
It is also the newspaper at which Lesniewicz worked starting in 1987 first as a graphic artist and illustrator, then he became an award-winning cartoonist, and eventually became production manager.
But he also maintained an active home studio. He began his art career with lessons in everything from silkscreening to cartooning in the late 1960s, then worked at this art after moving to Prince George, supplementing that income with jobs as a paving estimator, alpine ski instructor, sports shop proprietor, and more.
He deepened his expertise with courses at the new defunct fine arts program at the College of New Caledonia, then the Emily Carr art school satellite program at CNC. He also travelled to the United States, Italy and places in Canada for workshop upgrading.
It turned Lesniewicz into one of the leading artists in northern B.C., especially in the field of plein air painting (setting up to paint out in the open).
"It is so important to be there, and you can't even use a photograph to get you your painting," he said. "Photographs don't give you the truth of what is really there. The shapes are in the photograph, but usually the light conditions you saw with your eye are not seen by the camera."
Striving for authenticity is also what drives him to use oils, as the masters did.
His attention to detail, but balanced with the traits of impressionist painting (artful suggestion of an image, not painstakingly copying an image), has made him a favourite local artist. During the 2015 Canada Winter Games, his booth at the art market in the main plaza sold out of everything he had available. He has been called to Victoria to participate in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's annual Paint-In. He sketched the drawings in the sports quotes book You Don't Say by Hartley Miller. He has a positive relationship with the Two Rivers Gallery where his works have appeared for display and for sale.
Now, he initials the Alphabet Project with his brand of historical art, inscribing it with images that took only a few hours to form, and yet 100 years.
