‘Frog Cottage’ 2023, a painting by AJ Lee
I am writing this atop a hill in Tuscany, Italy. Sunflower fields stretch out below and tall, arrow-straight cypress trees puncture the view. And I am old enough now to appreciate just how lucky I am to be here.
The first time I visited Italy I was seven years old. It was my first time on a plane and the things I remember most about the trip are (in this order): Listening to Victoria Wood through my headphones on the outbound flight and not wanting to land because she was so funny; eating a huge banana flavored gelato in St Marks square that melted faster than I could lick; and getting a biblical nose bleed at a canal-side restaurant, that my flustered parents mopped up with a white cloth napkin.
Not long after that I watched ‘A Room With A View’ for the first time. Yes, the book is sublime but nothing could beat the intoxicating imagery of Helena Bonham Carter — with tumbling curls — being embraced by Julian Sands (RIP) in a sun-drenched barley field outside Firenze. The heat, the ancient architecture, the opulent flowers pushing out of each passing wall, and the dust that made everything and everyone just a little bit dirty. Bellissimo!
A farmhouse in Tuscany (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
It is this romantic vision that has kept me returning to Italy every few years, through the changing stages of my life — searching, largely fruitlessly, for that brush with truth and beauty. I studied the language in Florence, but spent more time sat on the huge stone walls of the Arno, sipping cocktails and learning the locals’ ‘i gesti’. I fell double hard for the Tuscan ideal via multiple viewings of Liv Tyler in ‘Stealing Beauty’ (which has one of the best 90s movie soundtracks ever FYI.) I returned to Montepulciano and the hilltop towns with a boyfriend I no longer wanted to be with, smoking endless cigarettes out of pensione windows with impeccable views while trying to avoid each others’ gaze. I rented for nine years in one of the most Italian American neighborhoods in Brooklyn — albeit true Romans would scoff at the cranium-sized iced coffees they serve there.
Needless to say, it is only once I returned as a grown woman, with my parents, my husband and the family we have built together that I can now fully appreciate what Italy is meant to be for me. Not a hopelessly romantic ideal where you must expect drama and transformation, always looking and feeling ravishing, and always falling short. Instead — with its janky Fiat Pandas bombing along medieval streets, and osterias with plastic furniture on each corner offering the most delicious fiordilatte mozzarella you’ve ever taste — Italy is a place that makes me appreciate all I have, right now, by celebrating life as it comes. Old and new, the trancsendent and the ordinary, all mixed up together. As Forrest Gump might say if he was from Positano not Alabama: Life is like a pomodoro — a delicious treat right under your nose.
Trying to capture that sweetness of the quotidien is also becoming a bit of a preoccupation in my painting — filtering through my psyche onto the canvas, the closer I get to the inevitable. (Hello, mid-life crisis.) I finished a painting just before we left for this vacation, called ‘Frog Cottage,’ that depicts my husband and his parents in the back garden of my in-laws cottage in Wiltshire, England.
Liz Lee, the star of ‘Frog Cottage’ by AJ Lee
It is a typically British scene: tea cups, deck chairs, roses rambling up a fence alongside the newly painted shed. Sunshine — so highly coveted in an season in the UK — slanting across the garden, allowing everyone a moment to bask.
It was a challenge to recreate the scene with it complexity of perspectives, but a joy to bring to life three people that mean so much to me. While I still have many technical skills to master as a painter, a challenge I enjoy is trying to capture the essence of my subjects. In this case, my mother-in-law, Liz, is the star of the portrait: reclining across the center of the painting, feeling the warmth on her face.
In life, Liz is a captivating woman: funny, creative, with pixie-like beauty. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia to an emotionally remote sea captain and his wife, she grew up in Wales but escaped as soon as she could, aged 17 years old, and has wild stories of living in London as an actress, including one involving Dudley Moore. Throughout her many careers she also pursued writing and is a natural storyteller, drawing a crowd at any dinner table she sits at. Now in her 80s, with a cropped white blonde bob and gold bracelets, Liz is as stylish and vivacious as ever, and has the power to make our kids collapse into giggles with the mere arch of an eyebrow. Above all else, Liz is a woman who has made her own way in life and, despite her 5’1” stature, is unapologetic about taking up the space she needs to thrive.
Detail from ‘Frog Cottage’ 2023, by AJ Lee
A friend told me he liked that I paint older people. I don’t really think about the age of the people in my portraits (although I actually prefer to paint when there are more angles to play with), but I do love when they have a story to tell — a story that somehow, through choice of pose, and color, and detail, I can try to distill and let others take part in.
I recently stumbled across a British artist, Suzanne de Toit, who specializes in portraits of other women — her image of iconic writer Jeannette Winterson, muddy and surrounded by lettuces, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Suzanne’s brush strokes are obvious and self assured and yet she captures an truthful, unfussy humanity in her subjects, often choosing to depict them doing mundane things like weeding or laundry. Similarly, some of my favorite of Alice Neel’s paintings are her sensitive depictions of her daughter-in-law juggling small children in her New York apartment. I wonder if female artists are more drawn to celebrating the everyday in this way, to acknowledge that these acts are as essential to society as the grand gestures that for so long have been the sole purview of men? Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Either way, I hope you enjoy the story ‘Frog Cottage’ tells to you.
Sunflowers in Tuscany, Italy (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
So, as I sit here in the evening sunshine in place I have been chasing all my life, I am happy to have a single glass of water beside me, a view I love, and my own father reading quietly in a deck chair next to me. Because these are the things that life is made of.