Kerslake was a founding member of the American Print Alliance and was active in the Southern Graphics Council, serving as that body's president from 1990 to 1992.
His formal study of art began in 1950 at Pratt Institute in New York City, where he was encouraged by teachers Philip Guston and Roger Crossgrove .
[4] In Kerslake's 1959 print “The Witnessed Image,” abstraction begins to give way to “interpenetrating organic forms with strong sexual overtones,” in the manner of Arshile Gorky's paintings, according to curator Larry David Perkins.
[6] The artist's first foray into the medium of lithography was in the spring of 1964, when Kerslake based some lithographs on paintings that he had created in response to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.
According to Larry D. Perkins, former curator of collections at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, the birds refer to “the transcendence of the spirit, while the receding rectangles that frame the portrait may suggest the passing of time or alternate states of existence.”[7] In 1982, Kerslake began a series of profiles of an old man with a bald head and a Roman nose with which he confronted human mortality.
Likening the piazza to a “large outdoor living room,” the artist enjoyed watching people gather there in the evening to discuss the day's events over coffee and wine.
Upon returning to the United States Kerslake decided that the nearest thing to the piazza's relaxed social atmosphere could be found in his backyard patio.
This insight inspired a series of paintings and prints whose subject matter, sun-struck arrangements of the patio furniture on the small square of concrete outside his house, occupied him for more than ten years.
The artist wrote that the arrangements, from which the human figure was always absent) were meant to suggest that the empty chairs had been recently occupied by conversing friends, embracing lovers and the occasional lone dreamer.
"[9] In 1990, Kerslake became interested in vitreography (editioned printmaking from glass matrices) when he was invited as an artist-in-residence to create in the technique at Littleton Studios in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
Over the next ten years he visited Littleton Studios six more times to create a total of twenty-five print editions using vitreograph and digital printmaking techniques.
Kerslake's colleagues at the University of Florida included photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Todd Walker, painters Hiram Williams and Lennie Kesl and sculptor Jack Nickelson.