From his early watercolor paintings depicting Liberia’s civil war that brought him to the attention of international journalists in the 90s, Leslie Lumeh moves on to become “Liberia’s most celebrated artist” according to CNN. His early watercolor drawings made him unpopular with the Charles Taylor regime forcing him to flee to neighboring Cote d’Ivoire.
Three of Leslie’s paintings are in the collection of the U. S. Embassy Art in Embassy program. Two of his paintings are also a part of the World Bank – Africa Now! art exhibition, 2007 – collection in New York. In 2022, he was commissioned by the U. S. embassy in Monrovia to recreate an historic art work originally done in bronze by an American artist, Leslie perfectly recreated the work using traditional artist oil paint on canvas. In 2015, Leslie represented Liberia in the first of its kind art exhibition, “Lumieres d’Afriques” which began in Paris in 2015. In 1998, he was commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Abidjan to do two watercolor paintings in commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Geneva Convention.
A resident cartoonist for the Daily Observer newspaper in Monrovia from 2005 to 2015, Leslie is also a well-known children book illustrator for the Canadian Organization for Education through Development (CODE) and UNICEF, he has been commissioned several times by media organizations to do courtroom drawings at international war crimes trials both at home and abroad. “I saw so much during the [Liberian] civil war. My early paintings were devoted to that period. However, I have always felt that something was missing. From being an IPD, to refugee, and having the privilege to sit in courtrooms where international war crimes trials are held, listening to perpetrators, victims as well as witnesses from that civil war, capturing their every emotion on paper as an artist at these trials, writing a book, though a fictional one, based on the life of one of the leading actors in that war, will fulfill that missing quest”. No Papers is born out of a strong desire by the artist to pen down his own interpretation of the civil war and the individuals that perpetrated it. Why some chose to fight to the very end, and why some willingly withdrew at the peak of the war.