“As an artist, my focus has always been on expressing the world of feeling and inspiration. My medium shifts between paint, fabric and furniture. "
~ Robin Lachman Lee
"In my paintings you may hear a quiet voice that murmurs through the lavish or fragile splashes of pure pigment.”
Artist's Statement
All my life I have found the two complementary and tactile mediums of painting and clothing design to be most essential to my being. With paintbrush and textiles, I come closest to meeting the energy, peace, pulsating color or resounding silence of nature’s glorious grandeur. With bold or delicate brush work, or in the fashioning of a graceful garment, creation has no limits. With my brush, I try to capture the vibrations of light on the horizon or on the water before me. There is a story there, perhaps rich or even utterly simple, but the smallest brushstroke can, like Nature itself, transform the seemingly unnecessary detail into an element of profound complexity. Painting helps me to translate my thoughts in a way that honors the beauty of my subject and satisfies my desire to communicate what I see. Where my words might fail to tell the story, painting and working with textiles help me make the leap from the imagined to the real.
Palette in hand, the scene in front of me comes into focus, but filtered through the lens of the places life has taken me, the people I have loved, music, poetry, and my lifelong fascination with the play of light. Likewise, when I create a garment, I plan, cut, and drape, but after I follow these steps, the fabric seems to come to life in my hands and the creative process takes over.
Recently, it is the exhilaration of plein air painting that has been my focus, but whatever the medium, I try to capture movement and color, depth and emotion, whether in the rustle of a green taffeta skirt, the roar of the ocean, or the way the sun catches on smooth stones at the bottom of a muddy trout stream. My husband and our three intrepid sons have led me to recognize beauty in less conventional places: at a noisy ice rink or in a thick rough, in the flowering meadow at the end of a hiking trail or in a daybreak plunge into an ice cold lake. Beauty is everywhere, and it is that much more intense when I experience it with them.
~ Robin Lachman Lee
Education
Robin was born in San Francisco and spent her childhood in London and the Bay Area, California. She received a degree in Graphic Communications from Cal Polytechnic State University. She also attended the California College of Arts and Crafts (Berkeley, California). She worked with Gale Lawrence Decorative Painting Day Studio (San Francisco). She has attended the History of Decorative Arts program at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She continues to work with the Ed Hinkley Studio (Chicago, Illinois) and Higham Hall, (Cockermouth, England). Robin has recently pursued plein air painting and Watercolor Short Courses with Maddine Insalaco and Joe Vinson at Etruscan Places, and with Ian Roberts in various venues. These workshops have taken her to Tuscany (San Gimignano and Cortona), and Umbria (Cerqualto); Montpelier, France and most recently to Mt. Desert Island, Maine and Ipswich, Mass.
In the past, Robin has done graphic design work for hotels, museums, shop spaces and various arts organizations. Robin worked in the antiques business specializing in 17th and 18th Century English Antiques. Her work in graphic design supported the start up of a Jackson Square Antique Society and the San Francisco Antique Show, Navy Pier. Early in her career she worked as a commercial artist in the corporate communications world. In 2005 Robin established Zippity and invented a twice-patented high fashion and multipurpose garment. She currently resides in Chicago, Illinois with her husband, 3 sons and animals
If you are interested in collaborating, please email robinlachmanlee@wontree.art