FEATURED ARTICLE
Annabelle Lee Washington, who signed her works as "Ana Bel Lee," was a celebrated artist whose vibrant oil painting hang in museums and corporations and private collections in the United States, Canada and Europe. She used rich vivid colors in her paintings to reveal what she described as "life as it is or may have been" in the rural South. Her best-known paintings portrayed daily life, including a midwife walking along a dirt path, a church wedding party, a baptism on a creek bank or neighbors gathering for a community oyster roast.
In an interview with the Times-Union one year, Annabelle said she often drew inspiration from "people-watching" travels along the coast and from studying books about Georgia and the Carolina Low Country. "I build the pictures from my imagination. I'll have a story in my mind and I just paint it. I tell people, what you see is what it is. The story is what you want it to be," she said.
Her paintings have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Harriet Tubman African American Museum in Macon, where her depiction of a church wedding scene is on permanent display, as well as Spelman College in Atlanta and Galerie Lumiere in Savannah.
Annabelle retired to St. Simons in 1984 from Detroit after a 38-year career in social work. She called the island "the land of smiles". She did many of her paintings at the studio of the Glynn Art Association -- a non-profit community arts organization headquartered on St. Simons Island. That is where she took up drawing and painting, after volunteering at the organization shortly after coming