Deanna Lee
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW through aesthetic means, to spend more time with the work, which may allow ideas in the work to be communicated. For me, the best art conveys two essential values— aesthetic pleasure and conceptual significance— equally, but most art leans to varying degrees toward one value or the other. Your approach is very personal, and your technique condenses a variety of viewpoints that you combine together into a coherent balance. We suggest to our readers to visit http:// www. deannaclee. net in order to get a more comprehensive view of Lee’ s work.) Would you tell us something about the evolution of your style and process? Also, are your works produced gesturally and instinctively? Or do you methodically transpose schemes?
Although I had some training in figure drawing and Western representational styles in school, I have always been, foremost, a maker of abstract images and inspired by physical matter. When I began making art in a serious way, I was enamored with experimenting with painting materials and process— involving lots of spills, drips, and pours— and letting those elements determine the work. But I grew bored and distrustful of the perceived freedom and authenticity of gestural abstraction. At roughly the same time, I learned the early
Renaissance egg-tempera technique, which demanded a welcome slowing of my process, and I was briefly employed as a painting assistant for a decorative ceramicist; both of these experiences taught me to be more deliberate in approach. My art from 2001 to 2006 was mainly conceptually driven, in terms of adopting a style that suited a given idea, and employed appropriated imagery in multiples. For example, one early solo exhibition featured two works: a group of fifty photo-based, postcard-size, quasiphotorealistic paintings of landscapes, and a sculptural floor installation comprising a few thousand three-inchtall plaster casts of a cartoon figurine, each one painted with a unique and colorful pattern. Then, I decided to appropriate the practice of pedagogical copying in traditional Chinese art, and I made a number of works that reinterpreted masterworks of Chinese painting. I also began to copy and reconfigure imagery from Japanese woodblock prints and Chinese decorative art. These works led me to develop a more personal way to draw that I felt more accurately expressed my relationship to these antique models: that of a contemporary Chinese-American female artist who was looking to male artists from several hundred to a thousand years ago( or more) for