Cedar Lee
About Cedar › Cedar Lee has been a painter all her life. She studied art at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD, graduating in 2005 with highest honors. Her paintings have been purchased by collectors and featured in solo and group exhibitions since she was a teenager. She sold her first painting at age twelve and now has work in private collections throughout the United States. She is represented by several art galleries.
Cedar is the oldest of five children and currently lives with her husband Kevan and their pets in Baltimore, MD. She runs her art studio from her home, where she paints vivid, dramatic...more landscapes and art on commission. She is actively involved in the art scene in Baltimore and the surrounding region.
Cedar’s hobbies include organic gardening, reading, contra dancing, world travel, and hiking in the great outdoors. She maintains her own website and is skilled in jewelry design, photography and pottery.
For more information about Cedar and her work, visit the artist’s website: www.ArtByCedar.com
This series of paintings highlights the sky as a constantly changing thing of beauty and fierceness. The movement and lighting in the sky during storms and at other dramatic moments, such as sunrise and sunset, have always awakened an excitement in me, a feeling of being truly alive and part of something huge.
My more recent paintings in this series have taken on an almost allegorical nature, with the sun and moon as characters acting a part, reaching long tendrils of light across the sky. I delight in the beauty of this imagery that comes mostly from my mind but is rooted in reality.
I am also symbolically exploring epic themes that blow my mind: Yin and yang, the balance of the universe, the great unfolding of time and space, the eternal beauty and mysterious workings of the cosmos.
I have converted a large portion of my suburban yard into an organic vegetable and flower garden, and I love nothing more than to spend hours under the sun, digging in the dirt while the bees buzz around me. For fun, I often go hiking on challenging mountain trails in nearby national forests with my husband and my dog. I love the smell of the woods and the sounds of birdsong and leaves rustling. Nature is my thing.
So it's only to be expected that I would want to explore trees, the most regal of all plant life, as a painting subject. This series began my senior year at Goucher College, when I started taking long walks in the woods on campus, gazing with fascination into the treetops.
Before I lived in Maryland, I lived in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. Mountains are so inspiring to me, for their beauty as well as their symbolism. They are grand and immovable in the big scheme of things--we are tiny and fleeting creatures next to the life of a mountain.
The gradation of colors from the looming mountains in the foreground of a scene, to the flat, hazy shapes of the distant mountains, and finally up to the open sky, is a continual source of fascination for me.
Some of the paintings in this series are based on mountains in this part of the world--the Appalachians, while others are based on the steep coastal mountains of Caribbean and Mediterranean islands, the Swiss Alps, the ancient hills of Mexico, or the Rockies out west. Many of the most wonderful places I've ever seen have had mountains as a backdrop.
My goal in painting a portrait is not only to capture a person's likeness, but also to capture that lively spark of personality which is hidden in the eyes, the tilt of the head, or the subtleties of facial expression-the little things that make a person unique. My first portraits were of those dear to my heart: my family. With every portrait I paint, I imagine my subject is a beloved member of my own family, and I take great care with every detail. The same goes for my portraits of dogs and cats—any pet owner can tell you that you don’t have to be human to have an endearing personality. My natural affection for others is what drives me to paint people and animals.
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