Jeremy is a Greymouth boy, and his admired largescale oil-on-canvas landscape paintings capture chunks of the West Coast and anchor them in your mind in a wholly unique way. But Jeremy’s Tai Poutini is focussed - almost all his landscapes depict scenes from the Coast Road between Greymouth and Westport. The hyper-realism style he has perfected for his landscapes also reflects this focus, and the works radiate an almost Zen-like wonder at the beauty they depict.

None of this is casual. Jeremy works from a small neat cottage studio at the base of the Paparoas, so he is embedded in the scenery he shares with us. His landscapes – while they start from the fixed instant of a photograph - evolve slowly, often over months and can take around 150 hours of actual painting time. Many of the imposing oil paintings are also available as high quality prints, the production of which is overseen by Jeremy himself.

Other Coast artists have managed to capture the essence of our region in different ways that resonate enough to gain the respect of the parochial locals… Cyril Hector through his inspired appropriation of Japanese colourism, Catherine Brough through the full-on assault of her extreme painting, and Toss Wollaston using the loose impressionism of a man who understood the bones of the earth he lived on. Jeremy’s work inspires that same respectful “Well done mate” identification, but through distilling a measured painted reverence into the same serenity that envelops us as we are actually out and marvelling at the beauty of our region.

Jeremy is a professional artist who has been finding ways to enable his talent since his teenage years. While known for the landscapes, his artistic life has two other strands that support it. The first is fantasy paintings – which one could be tempted to see as the yang to the yin of the landscapes.

They have always been there; springing from Jeremy’s early love of fantasy novels and identification with the particular stylised cover art that arose with that literary genre – think of the work of Michael Whelan on the Michael Moorcorft and Anne McCaffery books, and Frank Frazetta and Boris Vellejo who have both done covers for the iconic Edgar Rice Burroughs and Conan series, as well as countless other sci-fi and fantasy masters. Jeremy has been involved with some book and video cover artwork himself, but the images he has produced in this format, including his Star Trek reimaginings, were primarily created for his own pleasure. Unsurprisingly they have since gone on to find an appreciative audience in the outside world.

Finally Jeremy is a highly-skilled tattooist. The focus and fantasy of his paintings and drawings mean he is uniquely qualified to deliver detail and something out of the ordinary in his tattoo work, making him an in-demand practitioner, and providing him with a base income for the last 20 years or so.

Jeremy Leach artwork can be seen at the Reefton Co-Operative Gallery, 29 Broadway (which he is a part of), or on his instagram site: jeremyleach.art. Contact via jerrygleach@yahoo.com