Artist Statement

Jim Lee’s art encompasses a rich variety of media and approaches, from pure for-the-heck-of-it abstraction to works suggesting a conviction that art somehow has to be about something other than itself. At first he worked almost exclusively in the intaglio printing medium, but as a maturing artist his work came to include a wide range of other media, from graphic novellas or drawings tersely executed with a bare minimum of materials to multicolored canvases incorporating deconstructivist photographs and collage elements as well as traditional paint types.

 

Thematically, his work has focused on themes as diverse as the Cape Verde Islands, Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saul, Smokey Robinson and Mallarmé, language and civilization, life cycles, the blues, daytime hotels, and paleo battles between humans and animals on brown shopping bag paper.

Jim Lee’s work has been shown in a multitude of venues on the West Coast and elsewhere, and is held in private collections in the United States and Europe. He has been published as one of three selected artists in the “Art” issue of the Sand Hill Review [SHR 2013, Vol. XIV], and his painting “Peacock Angel IV” is featured on the cover of the main issue of the Review.