About

Gary Lee is a perpetual creator, born to discover and contemplate. He has an intimate relationship with the built environment, a dialogue explored in his paintings. Using acrylic paint, Lee responds to the colors, textures, and materials that surround us, creating an experience through his search for solace and subtlety. Using a burnishing technique, he shares this journey through various brush movements and the layering of unexpected color palettes. The method is active. Lee uses sweeping arm movements, often in a circular fashion, to spread and reveal the many layers of paint. Each composition arrives at a unique destination, baring the relationship between Lee’s movements and what the viewer sees.

Lee has always had an intense and deep relationship with material, form, and our environments. He studied Fine Art and Architecture at the University of Michigan and is recognized as an accomplished interior designer. He launched Gary Lee Partners in 1993, an award-wining interior design firm that has partnered with some of the world’s most respected organizations. Lee explores space and form further in his furniture design practice, having created collections for Knoll and Halcon and eventually founding the custom furniture line Chai Ming Studios.

Lee’s source of inspiration comes from organic and natural things. He paints from a converted barn that his partner Lewis renovated in 2016 to become a studio. It sits atop their quiet, remote property in Stockton, New Jersey, a town of 600. Lee comments that he is always looking towards the sky and at the ground to identify the colors and textures he will bring to life through his own organic process. Lee is equally impacted by the past, and he carries memories with intense visual detail. His early color studies were manifestations of these visual transcripts: colors recalled from books he read in bed as a child or patterns from the flannel shirts worn in college.