On the Art of Lee Lawson
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
author of Women Who Run With the Wolves
Lee Lawson's gifts as an artist are evident not only in her superb
technical skills, nor only in the ethereal palette she creates for her work.
Even more so her gifts derive from an ability that is older than time
........... the ability to envision.
She has clear memory of things that dance hide, misbehave,
dream, sleep, appear and disappear in the human psyche.
In myths and dreams, the unconscious, both collective and
personal, is often symbolically portrayed as a great body of water.
Lee Lawson's work clearly reflects those oceans that surge and thrive
beneath our mundane consciousness. She is as much a shapechanger
as she is an artist; a human being one moment, a sea creature the next.
Only a person who navigates the interior life on a regular basis
can consistently bring such spare but evocative images to canvas.
Her work, most richly viewed as both inner and outer seeing, testifies
to the fact that she is a rare artist especially skilled in bringing
to the surface mysterious yet clearly stated first person accounts
of the deep imaginal world.
C.P.E.