LEONARD FILGATE
For over 50 years, Leonard Filgate has been drawing and painting. He started out as a drawer in high school in San Francisco, advanced to oil painting throughout his young adult years, and turned to acrylic painting soon after his daughter was born in 1984. He has explored many genres as a fine art painter and dabbled in commercial work, painted signs, set designs for theater, book illustrations, storyboards, and props for film and video. He has created cityscapes, landscapes, maritime art, portraits, and whimsical fantasy works. From 1997 through 2010, he had focused mainly on the Rip Squeak® brand art for illustrated children's books, with a few diversions into a variety of other themed-artworks.
Leonard Filgate is best known for his illustration art for the series of children’s books and images he and his wife (Susan Yost Filgate) created, Rip Squeak® and Friends.
As the artist creator of Rip Squeak® and Friends, Leonard has been honored as the featured illustrator for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA and with a one-man show at the Delaware Art Museum (DelArt.org) in Wilmington, Delaware in 2005/2006. Leonard is also included as one of the children’s book illustrators in the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance’s Every Picture Tells a Story exhibition, which was described as “a celebration of diversity and tolerance as portrayed in illustrated children’s books.” (The exhibition has also traveled to the Bremen Museum in Atlanta, the Spertus Museum in Chicago, the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, and others in North America.) In 2016 he had several artworks included in an exhibition entitled Imaginary Worlds at the Fresno Art Museum in Fresno, California. Leonard was inducted as an artist member in the Society of Illustrators in New York City in 2006.
Today, he continues to create new art with a focus on birds and animals, both real and imaginary.
Originals and prints of his work have sold world-wide and his Rip Squeak® books have been published in multiple languages.
