FWA in the Studio ~ Lawrence Lee - Friends of Western Art

More About Lawrence Lee…

Lawrence Lee

Best known for his iconic shamanistic images, Lawrence W. Lee has been a professional artist for over forty years. His work is in thousands of private collections around the world as well as in the permanent collections of noted corporations and museums. Born in 1947, he has lived in Tucson, Arizona for much of his life, though he has also lived in the Guatemalan highlands and on a Caribbean island. He has written several books and has had poetry published in both national and international journals. In 2016 he collaborated with Ballet Tucson to create “Spirit Garden,” a new ballet based on the traditions of Dia de Los Muertos, which has now become part of the company’s regular performance schedule.

In the past few years Lawrence has begun to lose interest in figural work and has turned his focus more and more to imaginary landscapes imbued with the essence of the desert Southwest. “I guess Arizona has become very much a part of me, just as I have become so inextricably a part of it,” he has said. “Although these places do not exist in real life, they remind me of places I’ve visited or lived. I consider them to be something like unearned memories. They haunt me.”

Lawrence’s work has recently been published in “Curatorial Volume 2, Leaders in Contemporary Art “ and will also be featured in the soon to be released “Art Folio 2021.” Last January, his painting “Inside” was added to the Tucson Museum of Art’s permanent collection, and he has accepted an invitation to show his work in the Florence Biennale to be mounted in the fall of 2021 in Florence, Italy. He was recently quoted in an NBC News article about Cryptoart, a new genre in which digital artworks are sold and traded via “Smart Contracts” on the Ethereum blockchain, and he is one of about a dozen artists and collectors being chronicled in a feature-length documentary about this exciting new market.

“Watch for some big changes coming up in my creative life,” says Lawrence. “I’m just getting started!”