Gary Lee is a perpetual creator, born to discover and contemplate. He has an intimate relationship with the built environment, a dialogue explored in his paintings.
BACKGROUND
Lee has always had an intense and deep relationship with material, form, and our environments. He studied Fine Art and Architecture at the University of Michigan and is recognized as an accomplished interior designer. He launched Gary Lee Partners in 1993, an award-wining interior design firm that has partnered with some of the world’s most respected organizations. Lee explores space and form further in his furniture design practice, having created collections for Knoll and Halcon and eventually founding the custom furniture line Chai Ming Studios.
In 2016, my husband surprised me while I was away from home for a few days by converting part of our barn into a painting studio at our former country home on the Delaware River. It hit me that he had been listening to something all along that I did not realize I had mentioned off and on over the years: I once wanted to be a painter at about the same time I chose interior design as my profession.
He simply pulled something off the back burner, or from the freezer, and placed it on the front burner for me, and my journey began.
He also noticed something in my early work that has consisted to this day: how autobiographical my paintings are. In my earliest paintings, I agree with him that the point of view is from someone who is hovering above a sort of cloud matter, peering below to see if a leap of faith is possible. In this early painting style, I was being deft of hand to some degree, with light brush strokes on canvas, resulting in images that were soft, muted, and cloud-like.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Then came paintings in which the clouds were parting, and the faint apparitions of objects and places appeared somewhere below. The paintings resembled landscapes as seen from dizzying great heights. It began to feel like a literal return to home; the home of my childhood, the home I had created with my first interior design firm, and other places of home from which I had moved away. While Thomas Wolfe’s famous title “You Can’t Go Home Again” applies to so much of life, it is not entirely true for all of us. You really can go home again but armed with a different and distinct set of tools that nurture you and inspire you. My tools were simply brushes and spatulas and canvases.
“In my earliest paintings…the point of view is from someone who is hovering above a sort of cloud matter, peering below to see if a leap of faith is possible”
In my paintings, I began to find I was able to communicate better. How am I feeling? Well, on any day, you can look at a painting and see my joy, my anxiety, my self-doubt, my clarity, and even my anger. My husband began remarking that I was paralleling that communication in my words; my verbal communication with him, with my family, friends, and in business. Of course, I could see the connectivity between the two as my work in interior design and my furniture line began to take on a sort of second life; revitalized, inspired, and, quite frankly, transcending trauma, past and present. It also gave me more confidence and reduced my anxiety about my future. What better therapy is there in these uncertain times?
I love objects and geometry and had found myself enacting symmetry and balance in my interior design and what I created in my furniture collection over the years. There has always been a nice discordance and an explosive dynamic within the spaces and objects I designed but always held together nicely and in a peaceful fashion by symmetry and balance. But in painting, I have no such control. It all explodes in this beautiful way: asymmetry and discordance dancing together. If I was a musician, it is like I have gone from being in a 4-part harmony group into jazz, tension into fluidity.
What I had not expected at all was this desire to create smaller paintings that all wanted a pairing with others. If painting is jazz, then it is as though each musician needed its own canvas but was happy to be framed together as one work of art, on one stage working together. One, two, three, or more paintings framed together as one piece. For my husband’s 60th birthday, I created sixty paintings, each varying in size from 4” x 4” to 4” x 12”, all framed together for one large orchestral movement.
In recent years, I began adding mediums I had not thought of working with before. Paintings of 24” x 48,” for example, are paired together by me as a 48” x 48” work of art, and they both have generous applications of oil pastel, oil stick, graphite, and iridescent and metallic mediums.
The love my husband poured into the original painting studio is simply amplified with my love of painting, and I would like to think that love is seen on the canvas.
Love begets love, after all.
“In my paintings, I began to find I was able to communicate better. On any day, you can look at a painting and see my joy, my anxiety, my self-doubt, my clarity, and even my anger.”
Using acrylic paint, Lee responds to the colors, textures, and materials that surround us, creating an experience through his search for solace and subtlety. Using a burnishing technique, he shares this journey through various brush movements and the layering of unexpected color palettes. The method is active. Lee uses sweeping arm movements, often in a circular fashion, to spread and reveal the many layers of paint. Each composition arrives at a unique destination, baring the relationship between Lee’s movements and what the viewer sees.