It was one of those mild and memorable fall San Francisco days. SEE(d) Artist Series met at the studio of Artist James David Lee (he/him) for an afternoon of deep seeing, learning and sharing in the artist’s backyard art studio, out of his beloved late grandmother’s garage in San Francisco’s Excelsior District.
James explained his love of Daoist parables that invert perspectives and create worlds where we, the viewer, may not know what we are looking at. We lose our bearings in a magical, unstable world, forced to let go of what we know is true. In Lee’s recent book paintings, the viewer's place in the landscape is unclear, even slippery–sometimes, we hover above a ravine and occasionally look up from the bottom of a river floor.
In the series of ink works, instead of brushes, Lee used castaway household materials like crumpled-up Kleenex and fruit rinds to make imprints and recontextualize what we consider mundane vs. precious, adding a layer of ethereality to the drawings. In the poem paintings, Lee memorizes a poem about landscape and then copies the poem repeatedly, placing layer upon layer of oil paint and rendering the poem illegible. What meaning is left when the text is unreadable?
Similarly, the book paintings go through a process by which Lee pairs poetry with imagery. In the case of 'Rent Poem,' Lee borrows a poem from his friend Victor Vazquez incorporating fragments of the poetry into the inked landscapes and leaving us to wonder, in what world am I traveling?
Artworks are available for acquisition, please contact us: director@seedartistseries.com
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