Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.

SIDNEY — Not long ago, landscape painter Christoper Leeper, of Canfield, and his 10-year-old son, Brian, hopped in the car and drove to nearby Youngstown to take photos.

Leeper described their trip in voicing his appreciation for the invention of digital photography.

“Youngstown is a rusty city,” he said. “We went through some of the grittier parts of it. (Brian) was my cameraman. He’d shoot stuff and I’d say, ‘Go shoot more,’ and he he was yelling, ‘Slow down, pull over, pull over!’ We shot 350 photos. That would have been 10 rolls of 35-milimeter film to get developed. The other thing that’s great about the concept of digital photography is that I can look at a the picture immediately. If it doesn’t capture what I want, I can shoot again. In a way, you’re kind of sketching with the camera.”

Leeper uses photos as source material for his watercolors and oil paintings.

“I shoot and shoot,” he said. “There are things I’m drawn to — light and shadow, shapes or color — that might prompt me to take more pictures.”

But his paintings are not photorealism reproductions of the camera’s output.

“There’s nothing that can replace your eyes. That’s the advantage the painter has over the photographer. We can add to the picture,” Leeper said.

The Pennsylvania native completed a graphic design major at Youngstown State University and worked for 10 years for a health care system.

“In 2000, I quit my job and built a studio,” he said. Since childhood, when his artist mother helped him to notice the world around the family farm with an artist’s eye, he had wanted to paint.

“As a kid, I recall often sitting in the woods or on the edge of a field just looking at the birds, the clouds, the light, etc. In grade school, at recess, I would sometimes sit under a tree and watch my classmates playing. I really enjoyed sitting there and being an observer. I remember my teacher asking me if I was OK. Was I OK? I was great! Yes, I was a strange kid. What is interesting is that I feel the same way. I’m still observing. My eyes and brain seem connected to that boy back in Pennsylvania. I like that,” he said in an artist’s statement.

He works in all media, but mostly in oil and watercolor.

Leeper has experimented with making collages of painted images, paintings that his sons — his other son, Jack, is 11 — helped to do.

“It was playing. It was fun. I love doing them. I wish (the boys would) come out here and do that more often. But they’re doing their own thing,” he said wistfully.

Until recently, Leeper would paint a scene and then move on to another scene. But in the last year, he has begun to revisit locations, painting once in oil and once in watercolor or examining a detail or a time period with different light.

“It’s satisfying. I’m getting much more out of that process. I’m enjoying a deeper investigation of something,” he said. The resultant artworks may look almost the same at first glance, but subtle changes in light or mood reveal Leeper’s different intent.

“I’m more patient than I used to be,” he said by way of explanation. “I think it’s tied to the age of your children,” he added dryly. His choice of medium often defines how he looks at a subject.

“I’m seeing the same amount of information, but I’m processing it differently (from watercolor to oil). I’m painting this painting already in my head. There’s so much more planning with watercolor because you can’t go back. You’ve got to get it right the first time. The thing — usually light and shadow — that’s the same. But how I’m going to get to the final product is what I’m going through in my head.”

That advance planning is something Leeper dwells on in the workshops and classes he teaches across the country and in his studio.

“In watercolor, some of the mistakes can be mitigated at the front end, by planning,” he tells his students.

Among them, Dottie Bodnar, of Boardman, appreciates that Leeper is not intimidating during the class sessions.

“He’s always very upbeat and patient and calm with us,” she said. “He has a way of passing on his experience to us. He’sll sit down with us. He’ll start the process and we follow along on our canvasses or he’ll do a demonstration for us. He’s friendly and warm with everybody. Everybody I know that works with him really enjoys him.”

Leeper teaches daily in his own studio and once a week as an adjunct instructor at Youngstown State University, but he reserves Fridays for himself. What with the classes he teaches and the activities he manages for his boys — baseball games, music lessons — “I’m pretty scheduled out,” he said.

But he continues to challenge himself during his own time in the studio.

“I think that’s one of the best parts (of being an artist): you think, ‘I need to get to this point’ and maybe you’re at that point, but the point just shifted,” he said. “The thing I’m always worried about is that I’m painting a ‘Chris Leeper,’ that I’m painting an imitation of a painting I’ve done before. So I try to do different things.”

Abstract work, he noted, is one of the hardest things to do, breaking down a foundational subject to abstract elements. He gets the most satisfaction from realistic painting; although he noted that, “unless you’re a photorealist, all paintings are a little abstract, (e.g.) representing trees with a few brush strokes.”

His own brush-stroked trees and other scenes are in corporate, university, art center and private collections and the permanent collection of the Zanesville Museum of Art. It’s something in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that he’d like to own if any piece of art could be his.

“A watercolor by John Singer Sargent at the Boston museum. I’ll take any one of theirs. I won’t be picky,” he laughed. “(Sargent) is the beginning and the end of that medium. There are some artists that come along that have other-worldly gifts. He’s one of those.”

As for Leeper, he plans to keep painting for a long time to come.

“My son, when he was little, came home from his last day of first grade. It was his teacher’s last day, too. She was retiring. She cried. Everyone was sad,” Leeper said. The little boy asked when his dad would retire.

“Never,” Leeper answered. “I’m sorry,” said the youngster. But, without a brush in his hand, the father painted a happier picture for his son: “An artist doesn’t retire. He goes on making art.” That put a smile on the boy’s face.

“The wonder and blessing of it is that after 40 years or so, I am still excited, inspired and curious,” Leeper said. “That is a gift.”