Lester left the vexations of city life and surrounded himself with the wonderful environs of the Bay of Islands. It is here that he finds his inspiration for his beautiful representations of fish. They are muses on a life lived in the Pacific.
Quite unique to Lester are his works on tapa cloth. He uses the cloth as his canvas and it becomes an integral part of the painting process. Often reforming older damaged pieces into his own compositions, adding broken shells or glass with the feature being a vibrant tuna or some other fish created in gold and silver leaf and oil. The tapa is hung from a specially made iron rod which leaves the work suspended from the wall. The flowing movement created by this freedom adds a life foreign to most artworks.
Lester is a lover of the splendor of nature and how it reflects upon the wonder of his own existence. His work mirrors the magic he sees in life…. ”Stop, look at nature and the people around us again; consider the celebration of life.” These works are a natural confluence of Euro/Polynesian style, design and thought encompassing a freedom which might galvanize us all into a special culture, unique in the World.
“We are a new culture on the World stage-emerging now. Each of us can speak to what that culture will be.”