Carlyle Wolfe Lee

Carlyle Wolfe Lee is a highly accredited painter and multi-media installation artist who works from her studio in the woods of Mississippi. Wolfe Lee’s work follows the natural ebb and flow of the changing seasons by studying the colors and forms of the flora that surround her. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Mississippi and works in various media including paper, canvas, and installation. Her artistic process begins with simple sketches and color swatches which she transforms into stencils and silhouettes using both traditional and digital methods. Wolfe Lee uses the outlines she has created to mask off areas of the surface of her work which she sprays with atomized paint, created layers of overlapping color.

Wolfe Lee’s environments, realized in both watercolor and oil, are intricately layered, wonderfully complex, and present the depth and overwhelming beauty of the natural world in a way that is both thought provoking and comforting. Her use of color across works, while whimsical, also expresses the passage of time with the changing of seasons. When seen together, her works create a cohesive vision of the natural world over the course of a year. Where Wolfe Lee’s canvases are dense in their composition, her floral installations are marked by their detail and studied lightness. As much as the floral silhouettes are about the beauty of the sculptures themselves, they also create delicate shadows which float across the wall throughout the day. Wolfe Lee describes her work as a distinctly personal project to “develop an awareness of the natural world. It is about becoming progressively, cyclically more present to its rhythms, gaining deeper understanding of its design, and acquiring direct experiential knowledge of its mysterious beauty”.