ABOUT LAWRENCE

Lawrence Lee has been a professional artist for almost fifty years and an Honorary Artist Member of the colorful and exclusive Mountain Oyster Club in Tucson, Arizona since 1988. He has known love and loss in near equal measure. He is interested in almost everything but has a special fondness for language and subatomic physics. 

He says that he learned most of what he knows about making art in high school.  He went on to receive degrees in art (BFA ’69, MA ‘70).  He started showing in Tucson galleries in 1972 and had his first one-man show in 1976 at age 29.  Since then, he has had countless solo shows in fine galleries from coast to coast and Europe.

He retired to a Caribbean island in 2000--but life continued to happen in unanticipated ways. His wife, Mary Wyant, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and providing for her care consumed almost all of his savings, so he returned to work in 2014. Lawrence married Beth Valenzuela on September 30, 2022.  She died on April 19, 2024.

In January 2020, the Tucson Museum of Art accepted a second of his works into its permanent collection. His work is represented in the permanent collections of many noted museums and corporations, as well as in thousands of private collections worldwide.

Lawrence has published several books, including (Available at Amazon):

• “Living With an Impostor: A Confluence of Art, Depression and Dementia” -- detailing his former wife Mary Wyant’s evaporation into the fog of Alzheimer’s.
• “A  Field Guide to Dragons”-- A children’s book for adults
• “Poems 2012”
• “The Making of Spirit Garden: A Collaborative Ballet”  -- chronicling the development and production of “Spirit Garden,” first performed in 2016 and now on the Ballet Tucson standard bi-annual rotation of contemporary works. Choreographed by Chieko Imada.  (Available at Blurb .)

His favorite quote is from famed science fiction author Robert Heinlein: "Love is that condition in which another person's happiness is essential to your own."

Lawrence continues to live and work in Tucson.

LAWRENCE... ABOUT ART

It has taken 50 years for me to finally understand one basic truth about all art: people get out of art what they bring to it. No matter what I’m trying to “say” with a piece, it will always be perceived through the life-lens of the observer. Everything they have ever seen or done has created a filter through which they now experience life–and art. Each person experiences the work differently, and it is as though my art–ANY art–can create a door where no door had been. And if the art resonates through the life-lens of the viewer, the door will open. That door leads not out to some alien place, but in to “self.” When a person is fortunate enough to find a resonant piece of art and to open that amazing door, there is no end to what they can learn about themselves.

LAWRENCE... ABOUT WRITING

The doctor said, “Mrs. Lee if you were to get 100 boys born on Larry’s birthday and line them up from shortest to tallest, your son would be seventh from the bottom.”  And so was laid the foundation of my love of words.  Many years later, I had the good fortune of learning English from a woman who focused on learning words and diagramming sentences.  What fun!  While the big kids were having fun shoving each other around and playing contact sports, I was learning the true meaning of words like “decimate” and “reticent” and seeing how they worked in sentences.  In seventh grade, I was accosted by the playground bully.  Not wanting to throw the first punch and later be accused as the aggressor, I started talking.  I don’t recall that I talked about anything in particular, but he kept waiting for me to stop.  In disgust, he finally threw up his arms and walked off to find a more cooperative victim.

I have said that words are the only weapons I have ever mastered. I have not mastered them but can string them together well enough to communicate.  My heroes are not sports figures or pop stars; they are Sir Bertrand Russell, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the hundreds of others who, through their writing, have entertained, charmed, informed, and instructed me in the ways of the world and the heart.

There is a word that describes the unexpected closeness that can occur between two people trapped together in some dangerous situation.  What’s the word?