Lawrence Lee
TUCSON, Arizona
Lawrence has been been a professional artist for almost fifty years.
MessageLawrence W. Lee
Biographical Summary 2020
Lawrence says that he has known love and loss in near equal measure. He is interested in almost everything, but has a special fondness for language and subatomic physics.
"Most of what I know about making art I learned In high school," he says. "I went on to receive essentially worthless degrees in art (BFA ’69, MA ‘70). I started showing in Tucson galleries in 1972 and had my first one man show in 1976 at age 29. Since then, I have had solo shows in fine galleries from coast to coast and in Europe."
- He has been an Honorary Artist Member of Tucson’s storied Mountain Oyster Club since 1988.
- He retired to a Caribbean island in about 1999. But life continued to happen in unanticipated ways, and he returned to the easel in 2014.
- He has published three books and his poetry has appeared in several print and online journals and in an international anthology.
- In January, 2020, the Tucson Museum of Art accepted a second Lawrence Lee painting into its permanent collection.
- Lawrence is active in the world of Ethereum Smart Contract Crypto-Digital art and recently finished a month-long collaboration with an AI expert in which we used machine learning to generate new faces based on over 150 of his shaman paintings.
- His digital work is currently represented by SuperRare.co and KnownOrigin.io and other important platforms.
- In January, 2020, he again collaborated with Ballet Tucson by creating seven Hollywood style theatrical flats painted in a highly abstract homage to the greats of American jazz, especially that of Dave Brubeck. The finished panels comprised a work 8’ high and over 30’ long.
- Selected works are now being sold online not only on my website, but also at Tricera (Japan: tricera.co.jp) and Singulart (Paris: singulart.com).
- Lawrence was recently honored by having his work included in “Curatorial Volume.2, Leaders in Contemporary Art.”
- He has accepted an invitation to exhibit his work in the Florence Biennale in Florence Italy in 2021.
- Notably, Lawrence recently completed a major commission for the Interstellar Research Group’s 2021 Symposium.
He continues to live and work in Tucson.
Statement
It has taken 50 years for me to finally understand one basic truth about all art: people get out of art what they bring to it. No matter what I’m trying to “say” with a piece, it will always be perceived through the life-lens of the observer. Everything they have ever seen or done has created a filter through which they now experience life–and art. Each person experiences the work differently, and it is as though my art–ANY art–can create a door where no door had been. And if the art resonates through the life-lens of the viewer, the door will open. The door leads not out to some alien place but in to “self.” When a person is fortunate enough to find a resonant piece of art and open that amazing door, there is no end to what they can learn about themselves.