Lefever, Geoffrey

About the artist

One of East Anglia’s best loved artists until his recent sad demise, Geoffrey Lefever’s career - both as an artist and concurrently as an engineer - spans from the 1960s to 2024. During that time his style and subject matter underwent great development.

Latterly his work was entirely abstract, and he was as likely to be using a stick or a bundle of straw as a paintbrush to create his finely textured works in acrylic mixed with ash, graphite and ground pigment.

So compare and contrast the three recent works at the foot of this page with the very atmospheric watercolour and gouache landscapes that comprise the majority of his paintings in our gallery. These all date from around 1969 to 1971, the early part of his career.  Many are inspired by the landscape of North Norfolk, where lived, as well as the Essex marshes and Provence.

These early paintings were all acquired in the early 1970s by an enthusiastic, eccentric collector, Richard Cory Smith, who later gifted them to a friend, in whose home they had been stored, unmounted, unframed and all but forgotten, ever since.  But they had been painted at a crucial time - both professionally and emotionally - in Geoffrey’s life, when he was facing for the first time the challenge of making a living from his art and supporting a young family.

A professional engineer as well as artist, Geoffrey enjoyed pursuing both careers, equally at home restructuring people’s houses in Norfolk as creating and exhibiting his original and continually evolving art.

Geoffrey was a member of the Norwich 20 Group of artists: www.norwich20group.co.uk/Geoffrey_Lefevera

Most of the works shown here featured in our “When they were young…” touring exhibition. More information about this exhibition and the extraordinary story behind the paintings in our NEWS section.

Photo credit: geoffreylefever.com