Tamara Lee

“Can we go there?” was a refrain I have made since I was a very young girl living on a small dairy farm in central New York State who never went anywhere except “up the road a piece”. As soon as I was able to, I got out into the world to experience the wonders of new places; from the aromas and taste of the local food, to the paintings and textiles that defined the artistic endeavors of the culture and the best part, meeting people that live there and hearing their stories. I’d take pictures of course, but I was never satisfied with just the old standard snapshot, I wanted to capture the feeling I had when I was in that particular moment. I wanted to carry forward the essence of a place and my experience within it.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to travel to many amazing places both near and far. I even took an 8 month career break in my mid-50’s to travel solo in Africa, South East Asia and Europe. It was a life transforming experience and bolstered my confidence to figure out how to live my life in such a way that I would have no regrets with the choices I made.

Of course, I couldn’t just change it all on a dime! So, I came back down to earth, worked as much as I could in my “real” life and traveled as often as my pocketbook allowed. Even so, I was restless and filled with a longing to be exploring something new. I began experimenting with various art mediums like acrylics, inks and watercolors, painting imagined landscapes or attempting to visualize a recalled feeling from an experience on the road. In a way, I was traveling without leaving home. Surprisingly, I experienced a sense of calm, satisfaction and in fact, joy when I was creating.

Mostly, my work is focused on the concept of memory and the feeling of a place captured in that moment. Sometimes the memory is foggy, soft around the edges and just at the corner of the mind, other times the moments are wistful and romantic like a pastoral painting and then there are the times when the emotion of an experience is expressed abstractly in vibrant color.

In recent years, the thousands of fixed moments I have been lucky enough to experience and the need to work in a hands-on way coalesced into a textural and varied body of work that examines how we remember what we have seen.

By sharing my work with you, I hope it conjures up good memories of your own travel experiences and desires.