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Sunday, January 10, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Singular Style
Artist Lee expresses herself through cleverly blank faces of her subjects
By Joan Patterson
Review-Journal
Annie Lee grew up sketching her world on anything within reach at her family's tiny Chicago apartment. She especially remembers the discarded cardboard backings from laundry-pressed dress shirts. They made good canvas in a pinch.
By age 12, she was already making self portraits. One showed her as a grown woman with hair parted down the middle, one side gray, the other side dark as coal. Lee still doesn't know what business a child had drawing a grown woman with half a head of gray hair.
It was her friend, art. It soothed her. She would visit it at times of frustration or great insight. But even the girl-artist could not have imagined where art would eventually take her.
Today, Lee's paintings hang in celebrities' homes. They have been shaped into three-dimensional figurines that sell in J.C. Penney stores. They decorate slick wall calenders. There are even plans for cloth dolls and perhaps a coffee-table book that explains the images and what they represent to the 63-year-old woman.
Success has come. Yet, talking with Lee is like talking to a gracious next-door neighbor who would be just as amazed winning the local bake-off, never mind creating a solid string of art that has established her as a gem among black female artists in this country.
Lee, who moved to Green Valley a year ago to escape the brutal winters of Chicago, has only one of her works displayed at home. The rest are pieces by black artists such as Gilbert Young, Paul Goodnight, Charles Bibbs, Willie Tolliver and Raymond Cody. Even her studio is modestly housed in the corner of a poorly lit garage. But that's Annie Lee.
"It's an absolute blessing to be able to do something that you enjoy doing alone, to not have to be surrounded by people. I get so excited when I get a subject matter in my mind and I put it down on paper, sketch it, and can see it coming together. I get excited to go back and paint. Sometimes I think it may be a little sick," she says, laughing.
Lee grew up in a small basement apartment nudged in south side Chicago. Her mother was a seamstress who taught her daughter all she knew. By the time Lee entered high school, she was making all of her own clothes.
Both Lee and her brother liked to draw, but no one really encouraged their art as a longtime pursuit. It didn't make any sense to chase something that couldn't put food on the table, the adults would say. Even Mom, who would hold onto her children's drawings all of her life, encouraged more practical skills. For Lee, that meant shorthand and typing. Lee did receive a business scholarship to Northwestern University but turned it down to get married at 17.
In 1976, she started working for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad as a secretary and eventually became chief clerk. During this time, she also started classes at Mundelien College and eventually received her bachelor's degree, then went on to Loyola University and got a master's in education. It was eight long years of study but Lee had no plans to become a teacher or school administrator. She just wanted to fulfill the long-term dream of getting a college education, she says.
Through the years Lee continued to paint as a hobby. But one day, during a bus trip to New Orleans, that all changed. A woman noticed a portfolio at Lee's side and asked to look at it. "You should talk to my boss," the woman said later.
Not long after, Lee received a visit from the woman's employer. He had a company that hosted home show parties, similar to Tupperware parties only the goods included items to decorate the home. He liked Lee's artwork and asked her to produce several 8-by-10-inch originals. The paintings were a quick sell. He called her up and asked for 25 more.
Within a few years, Lee was creating artwork for a few home show companies. The demand was so high, she decided to leave the faces of her subjects blank to save time. The featureless images would become her trademark.
Then, luck turned its head again. A longtime friend visiting Lee in the early 1980s noticed a painting on her wall. The friend was so impressed he asked for the artist's name. When Lee explained it was her work, the friend was dumbfounded. He convinced Lee to let him hang the painting in his gallery. "He came back three weeks later with a check. ... Then we had an art show and sold 20 paintings in two hours."
Eventually, her art would be seen in galleries around the country. It would also be purchased as set decoration for TV shows such as "A Different World" and "227," and the Eddie Murphy movies, "Coming to America" and "Boomerang."
Today, she oversees the Annie Lee and Friends Art Gallery in the Chicago suburb of Glenwood, which opened 11 years ago. She also has created Just Original Images Ltd., a company that distributes the works of black artists. Her latest ventures are a series of figurines and cloth dolls, which she is making by hand, based on her artwork.
Ironically, Lee has become extremely allergic to the acrylic paints she uses. About four years ago, a doctor even told her to find another profession. But Lee just keeps going. She uses an exhaust fan to extract the fumes from her studio, which seems to keep her allergic reactions, such as a swelling throat and flulike symptoms, to a minimum.
"I've bought pastels. I've bought colored pencils. I've bought watercolors. I just can't get the brilliance from them that I do with acrylic, but I might have to switch to some of them."
Her art contains faceless subjects who tell their stories through postures, such as the turned-in foot of a woman getting her hair singed at the beauty shop; the stooped backs of teens shuffling through the final hours of a dance marathon; the raised arms of worshippers attending an outdoor baptism.
But it is the pictures of working black women, the kind who tote bulging piles of laundry and drag themselves to work each day, that have become the most popular of Lee's works, particularly among professional black women. If there is any message in these pieces, it is that goals can be attained, that even though your back is breaking and you're working two jobs, there is always hope, Lee says. "It can be done. Don't give up your goals. It's not easy but hang in there," she explains.
At the same time, her work is not concerned with raising social consciousness, she says. It is simply a look at real, day-to-day life. "I'm not from the dada school. I'm not making social comment. I'm just doing it for fun and I try to bring humor to my art."
Perhaps she's just experienced enough of the heavy-handed side of life, the side that turns hair gray. Lee has seen two husbands die at a young age of cancer, and in 1986 lost her son, who was then 28, in a car accident.
"Life can be really depressing. I mean my life could have been depressing ... I could mope, you know. But God didn't mean for me to mope so I try to bring a little humor to my art and to living. You can go on forward. You can do whatever you want to do. It's not easy. You gotta put a little effort in there, but the whole world is just out there waiting for you, you know. The thing is, you just have to do.
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Artist Annie Lee stands inside her Green Valley home.
Photos by Steve Andrascik.
One of Lee's favorite eras is the 1920s, as depicted in this work, "White Tie Only."
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