We were lucky to catch up with David Lee recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, David thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

Education and art have been intertwined throughout my career as a full-time community college professor and art gallery director/curator. I’ve devoted over two decades to curating and organizing exhibitions in Orange County, California, providing a platform for local artists to showcase their talents.

It all started during graduate school, overseeing small exhibition spaces in downtown Santa Ana. This experience paved the way for larger opportunities at various colleges and universities. I worked with Maggi Owens at Chapman University to establish the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Art Collection. Over ten years, we curated a collection that adorned the university walls, introducing students to the diversity of California contemporary art. This exposure sparked their interest in fine arts and guided their academic pursuits.

More recently, over the past decade, I’ve overseen the art gallery at Coastline College, organizing over 50 exhibitions featuring hundreds of artists. These events have fostered a vibrant creative community, fostering a shared appreciation for artistic expression.

My passion for art and education has fueled my commitment to creating spaces where artists can thrive and inspire others.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The notion of becoming an artist didn’t really strike me until after I graduated from high school. Looking back, though, it was always there, quietly weaving its way into my life. You see, my family had this habit of going on weekend adventures, exploring Los Angeles and the broader SoCal area. These excursions often led us to museums and other cultural spaces, and that exposure to art and creativity played a significant role in shaping my path.

But it wasn’t just those outings. My family tree has a mix of creative and structured minds. My crafty grandmother on my mother’s side, two engineer grandparents on the other, and parents who ran an ad agency created an environment rich in structured creativity. As a kid, I had various opportunities to explore my creative side, from woodworking to photography. I may not have been a skateboard pro, but I could build ramps and capture photographic moments with my neighborhood friends. This upbringing eventually led me to dive deep into woodshop classes in high school, creating and selling ads for the school paper, and engaging in various creative problem-solving activities.

So, circling back to your question—during my second year at Orange Coast College, I embarked on a semester abroad adventure in Italy. I fell in love with the independence, the art, and the connections I formed with faculty during this experience. When we all returned home, I began working alongside the painting instructor, Tom Dowling, handling light construction tasks. Much of the work involved projects for artists and galleries, and it was in these intimate, art-filled spaces that I saw echoes of the environments I grew up in.

I continued taking art classes at OCC, then packed my bags and headed to Chicago to complete my bachelor’s degree at Columbia College. Eventually, I found my way back to SoCal to pursue my MFA at Fullerton. Somewhere in that journey, it all clicked into place, and I realized that being a painter was where I was meant to be.

Have you ever had to pivot?

This was more of a shift in perspective than a complete pivot. From 2001 to 2016, most of my time was spent in Orange County, where I worked at various colleges, teaching subjects like design, drawing, painting, and history. It was in 2013 when I embarked on a full-time teaching role at Coastline College, and it was around this time that my artistic focus began to evolve towards a more abstract representation of the coastline, resulting in what I call “structured atmosphere paintings.”

The catalyst for this shift was when my wife decided to make a career move, leaving the museum where she had dedicated ten years to become the Executive Director at the Catalina Island Museum. For the next five years, we made our home in Avalon, where my new studio was a cargo container perched above the Pacific, overlooking the very place I had been so immersed in. I commuted weekly by boat to maintain my position at the college while continuing my painting practice on the island.

During these Catalina years, the concept of “cuboids” really started to emerge in my work. Outside my studio window, I would often see lobster traps, sitting idle for around eight months each year until the season picked up again. My studio was a shipping container, another cube in a complex of stacked containers, or you could say, cubes. So, anyone observing my artistic process was essentially looking at me within a cube.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

As I mentioned earlier, my wife is deeply immersed in the world of arts, but I usually refrain from bombarding her with more art-related questions or ideas after hours, particularly those concerning my own work. However, recently she came across an article/interview with Ellsworth Kelly in Apollo magazine. It somehow inspired her to conduct an interview with me, asking me similar questions. I suppose she’s a resource that’s been right under my nose for the past 20 years, and I hadn’t fully realized it. Nonetheless, this introspective dialogue with someone who knows me so well has proven to be quite enlightening. Here’s one of the exchanges from our conversation: J: Do you contemplate the concept of time or incorporate temporal elements into your paintings?
D: I believe that if you create something with enough strength, it can endure indefinitely. So then it’s like placing your ideas or objects in a box, safeguarding them without discarding them entirely. You can preserve things that may never see the light of day again. However, what you recall being inside that box might not necessarily align with what actually transpired—almost like a blend of memories. This is the structural underpinning of my paintings.
These cubes in my work can resemble still frames from a movie, capturing a moment in time when the cubes are either about to intersect or are on the verge of doing so.
You probably know that I have a penchant for 80s comedy films and, occasionally, heist movies. I tend to watch these movies repeatedly, to the point where I can envision the scenes in my mind without needing to glance at the screen. This repetitiveness is a part of what draws me in. After seeing something ten times, you start to notice imperfections or deviations from the seamless presentation that you might overlook after just one or two viewings.
In today’s age of technology, where things can be flawlessly generated, I find errors in films rather endearing. They don’t ruin the movie for me; in fact, flaws can add character, as long as the storytelling is compelling. In my artwork, I strive to refine and correct any painterly flaws, but in terms of geometric precision, I sometimes deliberately deviate from the conventional rules of perspective. This allows the viewer to take pleasure in seeing something that doesn’t quite align perfectly or conform to traditional angles.

Contact Info:

• Website: davidmichaellee.com
• Instagram: davidmlee00
• Facebook: davidmichaellee
• Youtube: davidmichaellee
• Other: davidplatinum.com sandwichandart.com masterdmlee.com

Image Credits
Portrait Credit – Tony Pinto Paintings – David Michael Lee