Logan Lee - Artist Statement

 

Pictured: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim #twinpeaks - Acrylic on canvas - 26” x 46” - 2025

 

To begin, one must start in Nature. Imagine it’s late summer, and you stand on a hill overlooking a field of golden wheat. The sun is high, and your eyes are overloaded with swaths of canary yellow and amber. In winter, however, the ground is cold, and you stand where the wheat has fallen dormant. The cold sun reflects bright whites, and muted blues, and greens. Frozen and pale. Then comes sunset in the spring, and the sherbet sunset reflects colors from pink to bright orange to lilac onto the new blades of grass forming on the ground.

Drawing from these subjects in nature, I set out to create dynamic blankets of color, which I see as potential backdrops for viewers' lives. Each painting I create corresponds to a particular scene in the natural world: An overlook of trees, a bed of roses, a puddle left over from the rain. 

I feel it is not enough to try to capture these scenes as one particular moment in time; instead, I contemplate the very essence they carry. I want to conceptualize each scene, and then put it back out into the world. These are not fleeting moments, rather they are part and parcel of a greater organic unity. Like all things, a wheat field does not exist in only one moment - it lives through many moments. By examining it in its various stages over a long period of time, and then putting what I see onto canvas, I am compressing the wheat field into a two-dimensional visual experience. That is my goal.

When I create these paintings, I imagine where each painting will live. A painting of the desert sand should be placed in the desert. The ocean should live on the coast. Each painting is informed by place, much like a fine wine that can be appreciated even more when paired with the right meal. The wheat field for example I would like to send to Kansas to live under an open sky. The tree trunk I’ve always imagined living up near Oregon, deep in the misty woods where the trees are tall. The ocean lives out in LA.

The palette for this group of works consists of Primary Red, Primary Yellow, Deep Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine Blue, Teal, Magenta, and White. My choice of color is informed by the subject, as is my choice of shapes. Thin golden yellow lines repeat to create a wheat field. Squares of bright green mimic a shimmer of light. Stacked triangles are mountains. The interaction of all of these colors, however, and how they move around each other, is really what I’m trying to explore.

Each painting is given a base color, the first color one thinks of when imagining the subject. A dark blue ocean. A bright orange sun. In music this would be considered the fundamental frequency, on which every other tone is built. Colors closer to this foundation will inevitably merge into the base color, deepening in hue and complexity, while the color farther from the base will create higher contrast, increasing visual interest. The same can be said in terms of the value and lightness. By putting down many layers of a diverse range of values and colors, there should not be any obvious shifts of either in the work. All of these factors should merge so seamlessly that they appear, at first glance, as a singular hue.

Once I have finished a painting, it is time to name it. I don't think the name of a painting contributes to its value, so I have fun with it. A rose, by any other name, would smell just as sweet.

 

-Logan Lee, 2026