My father, Merv Leib, was an artist who lived and worked in California. A graduate of San Francisco State University in fine art, he did graduate studies in painting at Instituto Allende in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico. For more than two decades he taught art in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1960s, he also designed a line of successful greeting cards, and later a cartoon strip. Merv was an avid runner, excellent skier, and could be found at the gym when he wasn’t teaching or in his studio.
While an excellent painter, his pen and ink, as well as graphite work, in my view really stood our as exceptional. His pen and inks are layered with cross hatching, stippling, and he would even go over areas and refine lines with a razor blade. In person, even more so than on line, the depth of these works is quite masterful. Many of his best pieces were large and could sometimes take several months to complete. Some pieces were diptychs and triptychs, the largest being nine panels in total.
‘This Screwed Up World’ and ‘The Tree of Life’
The last two drawings here were the final two drawings he made a few months before he passed away. They are both done on 9 x 12 paper. I don’t know how he was able to do so much detail. The second to last one he titled aptly, ‘This Screwed Up World’. He loved a pun as you will see. And the last drawing, ‘The Tree of Life’, which depicts a gnarled, baren tree towering overhead, perched on cliffs, it’s limbs in the clouds. Below the tree, very small is a little person looking up, pondering. I only really closely looked at the piece after he passed away, before I notice the little man below surveying the dying juggernaut of a tree overhead. Clearly my father knew.
