Emilie Lee’s painting vacation
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
New York City resident Emilie Lee rolled into Glen Arbor for a two-week visit on Sept. 27. Did she come to color tour? Wine tour? Any one of a million natural and artificial attractions that draw work-weary travelers to this little R+R oasis called Leelanau County?
“I don’t really take vacations well,” Lee said. “I think, ‘I could be painting this.’”
And paint, she will. Lee is a landscape artist who focuses on natural areas. “My painting practice,” she said, “grew out of my passion for wilderness,” which has led her to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore via the Glen Arbor Art Association’s (GAAA) Artist-in-Residence program. Lee is the final resident in the GAAA’s 2015 program. Her residency began Sept. 27 and runs though Oct. 10. Seven visual and performing artists from throughout the United States were selected to participate in this year’s cycle of two-week residencies.
As part of her GAAA residency, Lee will make a public presentation about her Glen Arbor stay, and display some of the resulting work. The talk is Oct. 8, 7:30 p.m. at the GAAA, 6031 S. Lake St.
Sleeping Bear in summer lures many visitors. Sleeping Bear in winter? Not so much. Lee, however, made the Bear’s acquaintance in January, introduced to it by her partner Rob Gorski, a Michigan native with ties to Traverse City. Neither sleet nor snow nor subzero temperatures impeded Lee on her tour of the park’s lighthouses and beaches and woodlands. A residency proposal was spawned out of this visit, and here’s what Lee proposed to do: “Using plein air oil painting, field sketching and note-taking, I will create a body of work that explores the Sleeping Bear Dunes landscape and the stories this place has to tell,” she wrote.
Uncovering the stories that this region’s most iconic place have to tell requires some reading and talking with people. “I am currently seeking ways to align my landscape painting practice with issues facing the contemporary land conservation movement,” Lee wrote in her residency proposal. “I would like to draw more direct inspiration from interaction with conservationists, scientists, and those who study issues facing conservation areas. I hope that at GAAA I will be able to meet with and learn from individuals working to conserve this unique landscape.”
To explain her wilderness affinity, Lee draws a straight line back to the East Fairfield, Vermont farm on which she was raised. Lee calls her parents “back-to-the-landers” who established a working, 150-acre farm on the Canadian border. “We raised sheep, horses, cows, chickens, goats, gardens, etc. for our own family’s needs and my dad was logging with horses for a few years until his business grew out of the horse powered operation and (then) he used machinery,” Lee wrote in an email.
When she left the farm, Lee did so to study illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design from which she received a BFA in 2004. Lee moved to New York City in 2009 to study with her mentor Jacob Collins, co-founder of the Grand Central Academy of Art in Long Island City. Lee now teaches there.
Visual artists have worked for the preservation and protection of wilderness areas since the 19th century. The Hudson River School painters are an example of this. These painters, active from the 1820s until the century’s end, established the first real tradition of landscape painting – the landscape was not just backdrop but became the sole and celebrated subject of the work. These dramatic canvases helped spur a conservation and parks movement during a time when cities and urban areas continued to expand. These dramatic canvases helped bring about a shift in the national consciousness — that the wilderness was not endless. Through public exhibitions of their work, the Hudson River painters sought to instill in the nation a love of wild places and a value for protecting them. This is especially notable because the images were not photographic. Photographic images are an inescapable part of contemporary life. They are an agent of persuasion that the Hudson River painters did not have; yet their works were persuasive. Big time.
Lee works in this same camera-less tradition. “In my studio practice, I choose not to work from photographic references,” she said. “The reason I’m painting is I want to have a relationship with the subject … My priority is not to make the painting look like a photograph. If I want a photograph, I’ll take a photograph.”
Instead of relying on a machine to help recall what she’s seen in the field, Lee relies on her memory, her field notes and studies. “I embrace the limitations of this process as a way to take my work beyond the purely observational and invite subconscious emotion and memory to play a stronger role,” she wrote in her GAAA application.
Bottom line: Lee isn’t interested in painting “pretty pictures,” she said. “I’m trying to focus my energies on landscape (paintings) that are about conservation and wilderness and (communicate) the importance of wild places in our lives.
“Landscape painting … reminds you of a wild place that is special to you,” Lee said. “And, it’s a daily reminder of the importance of nature in our lives. It’s really nice to be reminded that we are pretty small (in the scheme of nature), and it’s important to have respect for that. If we’re going to make responsible decisions for the future, we have to be aware of the things that threaten the balance. Spending time in nature is a way to get a real appreciation for that.”
This is the 10th in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Glen Arbor Sun is publishing stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.
