A painting by AJ Lee: ‘Dad and his dad’, 2021 (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
Ever since I can remember I have loved to draw and paint. What kid doesn’t, right? But, for me, it was always more than the regular desire to make something colorful; the act of creating felt essential to my equilibrium somehow.
All throughout school, I would doodle endlessly, amusing my friends by representing us — the gang — in pencil form. I defaced many a book (even a Bible, apologies God) due to my insatiable desire to be visual. Decades before I ever laid my hands on a copy, I was unwittingly turning my text books into a (very amateur) version of The New Yorker magazine: Sprinkling cartoons and stylistically connected yet completely random drawings between paragraphs of dense history or literature.
When I discovered photography it made my senses tingle. Using my dad’s old Olympus, a beautiful hard-cased, film-filled box of wonder, I found endless joy in framing the world and disappearing into the dark room with only chemicals and ideas for company. Yet I wasn’t content with waiting for real life to present the perfect picture. Without realizing I was doing it, for I knew no photographers or art directors at the time, I began to create carefully staged photo shoots: A double exposure of my friend at his decks to promote his first gig as ‘DJ Vision’; my sister reflected in a mirror surrounded by piles of makeup, as a statement on the image pressures on girls in the 90s. My dear friend Lucinda was my most obliging model — dressing up as a waif-like 1950s housewife complete with headscarf and fluffy, heeled slippers, and posing with her body wrapped around a giant box of detergent. (You can see a theme forming with my ideas… I was absorbing a lot of Cindy Sherman at the time.)
Photography of ‘DJ Vision’ by AJ Lee circa 1999 (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
Ironically, however, the thing most people pinned me as was ‘academic.’ “You should be a lawyer” they said, after I battered them with my half-baked but vigorously argued points of view. And I obliged. I did what academic kids are supposed to do — going to a respected university and getting a well paid job at a law firm with global name recognition.
However, I couldn’t shake the urge to create. Despite the 80 hour weeks and the near-constant fear of a flashing Blackberry light, day or night, I signed up for evening classes at Central St Martins, trying out graphic novel drawing and illustration. I travelled an hour to a dimly lit residential street in Tottenham for life drawing classes in someone’s living room (in hindsight, not so safe). In lieu of a love note, I passed my now husband a sketch of him as a sign of my interest, and years later I illustrated our intertwined paths for our wedding invite.
Illustrated wedding invite by AJ Lee (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
I switched careers, to be closer to creativity, and had the pleasure of working alongside some of the best and boldest graphic designers in the world (shout out to my amazing friend Lisa Smith.) I moved to New York, perhaps the epicenter of the art world, and drank in the museums and galleries and artists of every kind. I took more after-work classes, at SVA, to finally begin to learn how to manipulate oil paints — the ultimate form to master in my eyes, as someone obsessed with fleshy, people-centered art and a mega-fan of Alice Neel. Today, I carve out odd hours of immersion with a paint brush in hand, hidden in our dusty barn, see-sawing between loving every minute and hating every brush stroke I make.
A painting by AJ Lee: ‘Ice cream at Davenport’, 2021 (image courtesy of AJ Lee)
And yet, however hard I work to scratch my itch, I am not an artist. I am a lawyer, a strategist, a business leader. That’s what is on my resume. That’s what people hire me for. That’s how I make money and, thus, what I spend the bulk of my time doing. The older I get, surrounded by friends who have devoted over 20 years of their life to legitimate artistry, the less I feel I can or could credibly claim art as my identity — something that people would give credence to and recognize me for. I have not put in my 10,000 hours; my craft is unhoned. I didn’t put my nascent skill to the test when I had the chance, life ahead of me, aged seventeen. I wasn’t willing to turn away from the expected path and put something on the line for my work. Perhaps that time has yet to come, perhaps it never will.
I often think about a day, around this time of year, when it gets dark at 4pm. My friend Emma and I are in the art studio at high school, the inky sky outside making the fluorescently lit room oddly cozy. Mr Taylor, our quietly inspiring teacher, is puttering about cleaning up after the days’ classes, raising an eyebrow as our anecdotes become more free flowing. There’s music on, and we are painting, and laughing. Em’s piece is an ode to Chuck Close, mine echoing Lucien Freud. We have paint on the cuffs of our Air Force blue sweaters and our shirts are untucked. There’s no deadline in sight. We would do this every day if we had the chance.
Am I an artist? No. Maybe never.
Will I continue to try to make art? Yes, always. I don’t have any choice.
This edition is dedicated to all the hard-working, life-changing art teachers in the world — Mr Taylor in particular. Stay tuned for a conversation coming soon with Carrie Wykoff on the reinvention of the beloved Rosendale Theater.