John Lee

John Lee (b. 1969), painter and teacher. 

Lee is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Certificate Program, receiving his BFA at the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Indiana University.  Exhibits include various group shows in the eastern and southern U.S., including an invitational show at the Prince Street Gallery in New York and a solo show at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.  Lee will be participating in an upcoming group show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum in January 2014 with the painting collective ‘Perceptual Painters’.

“I have long been interested in a tradition of painting that plays off of a French sensibility of Seeing and Construction (Constructing Space in a painting).  Various lineages of painting have interpreted these sensibilities for me in interesting ways, lineages that include especially specific American and British Schools.  Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann have both been important to me through the schools and lineages that sprang from their teaching, as well as the Bloomsbury group, Camden Town Group, and the Slade School in Britain.  

As a visual painter, I am naturally drawn to certain lighting situations and spaces that often involve shadowy colors and weathered patinas.  The play between fluidity airy color and light as it pushes against dense architectural forms (especially walls) has long fascinated me as a subject.  The expressive potential in my work results from the visual response to these situations as well as the search for a working process through the medium of oil paint.”