Cedar Lee April 26th, 2010

About 10 years ago, when I was still in school and knew I was a painter but hadn’t found a clear direction for my work, I did a small series of paintings inspired by the pixelation of low-quality digital photographs, the art of Chuck Close, and the images of plant cells under a microscope from some college biology class.  I decided to do these portraits of people broken up into a grid, with variations of color in each cell of the grid.  I called them “square paintings.”

It ended up being just a phase in my artistic journey, but doing those paintings taught me some skills (color mixing, composition, patience) and some new ways of looking at things.

I made 5 paintings.  The first was simply titled “Square Girl.”  I stole her face from a magazine ad for deoderant.

I painted her in cheap student-grade acrylics on a cheap student canvas board, but somehow I achieved a luminescent effect, and I still think she is the best out of all the square paintings.  Some friends of my grandparents bought her for $200, which was a big deal for me at the time.  (I was 18.)  My aunt later commissioned me to make a copy of Square Girl for her, but I don’t have a photo of that painting.

Then I made “Dove Woman,” whose face I stole from a magazine ad for Dove soap.  The gentle and stately expression in her eyes reminded me of my husband’s grandmother, so I ended up giving her this painting as a gift.

Then came “Cosmo Girl,” whose face I stole from a fashion model in a Cosmopolitan magazine.  Her hair was so much fun to paint.  The photo below isn’t actually the original “Cosmo Girl;” it’s a copy I painted of that original.  I gave the original to my husband and he still has it, somewhere.  This painting I gave to my cousin years later, because she liked it.

At this point a lot of my family were fans of the square paintings, and as I didn’t yet think of myself as “a real artist” at this point and hadn’t really shown my work to many people, I figure they were probably my only fans.  But hey, it counts!  My mother-in-law requested a square painting of a moose.  I said, “why not?”

Then I decided I needed to paint a man, so I stole a handsome one from an ad for Nautica Cologne.  I called him “Nautica Man.”  I never ended up giving or selling him to anybody.

Nautica Man has sat in my house in one place or another for 10 years, usually in some back storage room in some stack of paintings that I didn’t like anymore but couldn’t bear to throw away.  I’ve always thought of him as part of a valuable learning experience on my journey from not knowing the first thing about painting to where I am now.  It took me many hours to paint him.  But he’s not the kind of thing I’ve ever really wanted to hang on my wall.

Finally I came to my senses with this realization:  When I hold onto old art that doesn’t represent me anymore, that holds a place in my heart only because I created it, and is never seen by anybody, that art becomes dead weight.  Just knowing that the physical form of that art still sits like a lump in my home holds me back and bogs down my creative spirit.  Getting rid of the old makes room for the new to come into your life. This applies to all things, art included.

So last month I made the painful but necessary decision to euthanize Nautica Man.  I painted over him with gesso and decided to give the canvas to a student artist to reuse.

I felt slightly nauseated at the time but now I just feel free!

• General Ramblings About Art, Creativity, Philosophy , My Artistic Past
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Cedar Lee January 11th, 2010

I was looking through some of my photo archives of older artwork on my computer and wanted to share these paintings with you.  I did them as a “4 seasons” project for a college art class years ago.  I’ve since painted over the originals with gesso (which is a kind of primer, for you non-art-geeks) and given the canvases away for a friend to paint on, so the originals no longer exist.

When I painted them, I thought they were brilliant–my very best work!  Now, they seem so crudely done.  I clearly had little understanding of the proportions of the human figure (note the glaring lack of torso in “Summer”–yeesh!) but even so, I think they were successful on some level.  I conveyed the emotions that I attach to each of the 4 seasons.  Am I a cold-weather girl or a hot-weather girl?  Bet you can guess!

In doing this project, I also taught myself some important lessons about color palettes and how to choose colors that embody the mood I’m going for.

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

Whenever I look back at my crude older work, I’m thankful at how far I have come in improving my skills, and I’m also reminded of how far I still have to go.  So I get a dose of self-confidence alongside a dose of humility, and I firmly believe both are necessary to the development of any artistic pursuit.

• My Artistic Past
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Cedar Lee July 28th, 2009

A friend on Facebook recently told me, “I want to know the story of the first time you picked up a paint brush and started painting.”

That’s a hard story to tell because I have no recollection of one such time.  I’ve read many stories of artists who “became artists” at some point in their lives–how at some point, they experimentally picked up some art supplies and began playing, and this moment for them became a turning point, a great discovery and a spiritual awakening to their true creative purpose.  Maybe before that moment they had worked for an insurance company; maybe they had always had dreams of pursuing art but had been too scared to try.  Maybe for them their love of making art was a completely unexpected discovery.

I wish I had a dramatic and inspiring story like that, but I just don’t.  I have always been a visual artist, and I have always painted.  I became more focused on the specific medium of painting around the age of 12, but my entire childhood before that, there was never a time when I didn’t spend at least some of my time painting.  It’s not the only interest I’ve ever had, but it’s always been there.

It’s impossible for me to pinpoint a time when I became “serious” about my art.  My art is a part of me, and I gradually became more serious about it as I grew into an adult and became more serious about everything in life (and of course, as better art supplies became available to me.)  People have told me that I’m lucky to have such a clear vision of my calling, and that many people never find that clarity even after a lifetime of searching.  I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t know how lucky I am, but it is what it is.  I can’t imagine being any other way.

It’s hard to say how I got that way, but I’ll attempt to explain my creative beginnings.

I think all children are dreamers and creators.  The thrill of creating–of using our minds and our hands to make things, is natural.  I’m happy I’ve kept that spirit of creativity, and I attribute a lot of that to the way I was raised.

I don’t know if I would have been born a painter had I been born into a different family.  My parents never at any point discouraged me from following my interests.  I know that in many families, sad as it is, many a child’s interest in art has been quickly labeled as a frivolous pursuit and mercilessly squelched before the interest had time to take physical form.  I know that not every child grows up with stacks of paper, crayons and watercolors readily at hand.

Neither of my parents is a visual artist, but my mom and dad are two of the most enterprising people I know.  They practice creativity as a value to be lived.  If you have an exciting idea, a wish or a dream, it’s at least worth a try to make it real.  If your efforts fail, you can re-evaluate and try again.  If you want to do something, do it!

Some of my earliest memories are of helping my parents with hands-on projects.  I wrote the following poem when I was in college.  It’s about the idea of yin and yang in all of us, how we are each created from both male and female, and how each person has two opposing and complementary types of energy within them.  It’s a concept that’s always fascinated me.

But in a more specific sense, it’s about my mom and my dad, and how they both infused me with creative energy by sharing small, practical creative actions with me on a regular basis–little things like my mom teaching me to mix paint and to make scented herbal satchels and fresh orange juice.  My dad teaching me the basics of carpentry–measuring and cutting wood.

Equilibrium

Clinking wind-chime bells, she is yin.
She teaches me to mix creamy colors
in the concave cups of a rounded palette.
Add some white, turn red to pink.
We sew tiny beaded pouches,
fill them with dried lavender and mint.
Collect drops of sweet thin juice
from ample oranges by the kitchen sink.

Rumbling wooden drums, he is yang.
He teaches me to hammer nails in wood.
We measure, heads together, draw pencil marks.
Run the orange extension cord
under the sawhorse.  Allow the scream
of the electric saw, plowing through a board
and the fragrance of spitted sawdust
to infiltrate our heads.  Our pulses thud.

But painted colors, big and bold, are yang.
And floating flurries of sprinkled sawdust, yin.
By being themselves they make each other
—and me.  I beat my path out fiercely, like the sun,
but also whisper, like the floating moon.

So at some point, probably as a toddler, I decided to make a painting, probably a crude smear of finger paint.  Then I decided to make another one.  Then I never stopped.  Maybe someday, if I live long enough, I’ll get good.

• General Ramblings About Art, Creativity, Philosophy , My Artistic Past
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Cedar Lee May 26th, 2009

When I was little, one of my mom’s close friends, Anita, had glorious long black hair all the way down her back.  I thought her hair was so beautiful and remembered being totally enthralled by it.

This may have something to do with the short haircut that was forced upon me by an unfortunate case of head lice at the age of 6.  My haircut made me feel like a boy, and I dreamed of having hair like Anita’s.

Although my hair grew back out quickly enough, and the whole thing was really not as traumatic as I make it out to be, my preference for beautiful long hair on girls lasted into my early teen years, when I chose to keep my hair as long as possible.

My family moved away and I never saw Anita again and rarely had reason to think of her.  Fast-forward 20 years.  Through the wonders of the Internet, my mom and Anita have now re-connected on Facebook, and now that I can relate to Anita on an adult level, I’ve gotten to know her a little bit online.  It’s pretty cool.

Anita found, buried in a box in her garage, a picture I had drawn as a child, which she posted on Facebook today.  A “Cedar Lee Original.” 

I have no recollection of drawing this, but I can only assume the figure on the left is Anita with her sleek & luxurious long dark hair.  I interpret the surprised grimace on her face as my attempt at friendly open eyes and pretty red lips.

Anita holds hands with a legion of undefined stick figures (probably girls, based on their hair?) so numerous that they stretch off the edge of the page.  I retroactively title this work “Anita, Friend to All.”

I’m still recovering from a very active Memorial Day weekend–I had siblings from out of town, and we went dancing, hiking, and to a barbecue.  I also finished all my weekend chores, and went through every item of clothing I own and performed an organizational overhaul on my closet!

This week I plan to finish the “Looking Up” painting I’m working on, and I’m starting to draw up the plans for my next project, a commissioned cat portrait.

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Cedar Lee January 21st, 2009

When I was growing up, I did hundreds of art projects. There was never a time when I wasn’t creating–even when I was very little, I was into art in an intense way.

But I really got serious and narrowed my focus to painting during middle school, when I began working with acrylic paints for the first time. I spent hours and hours working in my room. Most of what I made was terrible. I didn’t have much skill and at that point was just figuring out the basics of color mixing.

This is the first painting I can remember doing that I was satisfied with–I was 13 when I made it.  All things considered, I quite like this painting and still think of it as a success.  It is the only piece of art from those very early years that I bothered to keep–everything else has been forgotten–thrown in the trash, recycled, or given away.

I was inspired to paint it after looking at pictures of lions in wildlife books.

Lion
20″ x 16″
Cheap acrylics on “student board” (which is made of low quality canvas glued to cardboard.)

You can see the crudeness of the brush strokes, and the way the white of the canvas shows through the paint in places.

But, specifically because I was trying to figure out how to make the paint do what I wanted, and I had no experience, I think I made some pretty interesting things happen.

I remember I was SO so proud of the way I painted the lion’s eyes–the dark speckles to add depth, the white stippled highlights to add sparkle.

The awkward, childish signature is more telling of my young age than any other part of the painting.

(This is how I sign my paintings now:)

All technical skill (or lack thereof) aside, I have a particular fondness for this painting because I think of it as a mile marker–as the moment I became a “real artist.”  I know logically that I’ve always been a “real artist,” and the moment I made this painting was the culmination of my entire childhood to that point, spent looking carefully at the world, thinking about how to create visual beauty, and experimenting with technique.

But this painting holds a coming-of-age symbolism for me.  I was going through puberty at the time. I was a very serious and intellectual girl who had few friends and spent a huge portion of my time reading. I had a lot going on internally–the changes in my body were totally eclipsed by the changes in my thoughts. I was becoming aware for the first time in my life of a huge world of ideas that existed out there–opportunities for the taking.  I was consciously defining who I was going to be.

This lion is proud, noble, beautiful and fierce, with an intensity of purpose, eyes showing wisdom as well as a blazing passion–all tempered by a kind spirit and a generous heart.  When I painted him, I saw him as the embodiment of the best parts of myself.  (I am a Leo, big surprise.)

I wish I’d known at that time how important it was to use high quality materials–not that I had any money for art supplies at that age–but it was a lesson learned the hard way.  When you’re just learning, you never expect you’ll make anything good, but when you do, you’ll want to keep it around.  During all of my teenage years, I usually used the cheapest art supplies–sometimes I even painted on poster board, scraps of cardboard, or just whatever paper I had.

Here’s another very early piece I can show you.

Spinner
28″ x 22″
Cheap acrylics on canvas

I made this painting when I was 16. By that point, I had gotten my first job and had more money at my disposal, so thankfully, this one is painted on an actual stretched canvas, albeit a cheap one. It’s a self portrait I made as a gift for my boyfriend. The only reason I still have this painting around, or even a picture of it, is that boy is now my husband. He keeps it on the wall of his home office.

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