Lee Lee: Painted Lady after Joachim Alves Gaspar
Watercolor & pencil on paper

In 2019 I was awarded best landscape design from Maine Homes by Downeast Magazine. They awarded first place for reader landscaping for my third year garden at the SEED Barn, where we spent four years renovating an old 1835 home of boat-builder John Cheever that sits on Conary Cove in Blue Hill Falls. They say that it takes three years to establish a garden from seed in Maine, so I was happy to have initiated this process early on and to have received recognition as it was being established. Every year, we grow out an assortment of new native varieties to plant as pollinator pathways and native foodways. As the plants grow into maturity, I look into what particular wildlife the plants support, then gather open source photographs, from which I create drawings as studies. Sometimes I integrate stains of the plants suporting the pollinators directly into the work. Observational drawing is one of the best ways to gain understanding of form, and through exploring the relationships of forms, to become familiar with the functions that are the basis of eco-systems. While these open source images are quickly becoming essential to my own work, I have also begun gathering collections of the images to distribute to educational programs so that students may begin forming their own knowledge of local systems at work.

Lee Lee: Samia Cynthia Larvae after Diego Delso
Watercolor & pencil on paper

Lee Lee: Brown Elfin after Walter Siemund
Watercolor, ink & huckleberry stains