Jaikoo (“Jay”) E. Lee is our featured artists for the month of April and May.

Opening reception is Friday April 4th, from 6pm to 9pm meet the artist and see his exhibition!

Jay's artwork will be on display thru May 31st at our South State Street gallery.

2 South State Street
Newtown Pennsylvania 18940
Www.Countrysideframes.com
Countrysideframes@gmail.com
215.896.2246

Sunday - Monday 11am - 4pm
Tuesday - Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday - Saturday 10am - 7pm

Jaikoo (“Jay”) E. Lee
My watercolor painting seems to engage my whole being: mind, body, spirit, and soul. Therefore, I call the very act of my watercolor painting “my spiritual practice.” It’s a vibrant expression of my love and passion for the subjects I feel drawn towards to paint.

Born in South Korea and raised in a farming village, my roots are intricately intertwined with the nature as my very flesh and blood. As part of a family that owned fields and rice paddies, I ate off of those lands, as it were. When I walked home from school, I walked to our rice paddies, rolled up my pants legs, stepped into the muddy water, and did weeding, constantly plucking leeches (blood-sucking worms) off my ankles and tossing them to the dry land. When the harvest time came, I helped my dad and other helpers from the village with harvesting rice, bundling the ripened rice plants into sheaves. When home, I would go over to the garden by the side of our house, gather leaves, yard trimmings, and food scraps onto our compost, and look after it until the next planting season. Thus, every day I lived in nature and with nature.

Having grown up in such a setting, I always felt that my watercolor painting should be more than just a mechanically exacting reproduction of what I am staring at in nature. Rather, something deeper, part of my instinct, my intuition, every cell in me… Then I came to read Artist John F. Carlson’s words that resonated with me instantly. For he said in his book Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting, “Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul. We love suggestion and not hard facts.” So, when I paint, I get immersed in creating something pulsating in my deep emotions. My hope is that, when someone looks at my painting, it will, to borrow Carlson’s words again, “evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks of a work of art.”

There is another way my early years in the rural area influenced my art. I grew up without phones and cars, and whenever I needed to go anywhere I wore my tattered shoes and walked on dirt road. For longer distances, I walked first as far as my school and took a bus or a train. For six years I walked around a huge reservoir and the dam to school and back home. Then I walked to a middle school for another three years by walking twice as far. Then our family moved to Seoul for my high school and college education.

In a word, I allowed the nature, in which I lived, walked, and worked, to become a “natural”—the pun not intended—part of myself. Out of such an inner being emerge my watercolor paintings, which, I hope, “evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotions.”