Doris Lee

Doris Lee observed everyday activities with an attentive sense of narrative and colour. Trained partly in Paris and San Francisco, the American painter spent much of her career in Woodstock. Her painting Thanksgiving won the Logan Prize in Chicago in 1935 and attracted national attention. Women cooking, working and gathering together occupy an important place within her imagery.

Her compositions bring American Scene painting into contact with folk art and modernist experimentation. Arrangements of colour and surface gradually become freer, while landscapes, objects and people remain recognisable. Lee also worked as an illustrator, notably for LIFE magazine, and travelled on commissions. She died in 1983. The apparent simplicity of her scenes rests on considered visual construction, giving ordinary activities a distinctive artistic shape and presence.