NICHOLAS ANGELO
FINE ART

DORIS LEE

American - (1905 - 1983)

DORIS LEE: "I was born in Illinois and I graduated from Rockford College in Illinois. After that I went to Europe for a year and studied painting. My father always thought it was very important to have what he called a general education so that I, in getting a liberal arts degree, couldn't do as much painting as I wanted to although I always painted a great deal as a child. I always made the family place cards and little things like that. I was always liking to paint. And after I studied in Europe, I then came back here and was in San Francisco and Kansas City two different years where I studied some at the Art Institute of Kansas City and also at the California School of Fine Arts. After that I came to Woodstock. In Woodstock I painted for a couple of years, exhibiting my work in the Woodstock Gallery. One day in 1935, (I was still quite young), the same day I received word that I'd won the Logan Prize at the Chicago Art Institute and also that I had won the commission to do murals from the Treasury Department in Washington. It was really very staggering to me, and very exciting. I had a studio, (while I always had a house here in Woodstock) that I went to in New York in the winters at 30 East 14th St. Kenneth Hayes Miller was there, Alec Brook, Emil Ganso and a great many other painters had studios there. And it was a good thing I had this very large studio because that was where I did the Treasury Department Murals. At first I was invited to send sketches. I think they invited a certain number of people and it was from that, those people who had been invited, that the awards were given. The Federal Post Office was just being built I believe and here was to be two large murals on each floor. The subject that they gave me was the rural delivery in America. And my background was suited to this because I was living very close to a little town in New York called Bearsville and I'd also been born in a small town near the Mississippi River in Illinois. So I made my pencil drawings and then, after that, I made the color drawings and after that, the large cartoons which I did at 30 East 14th St. At each stage they were sent to Washington and okayed for the next step. The one mural was the outdoors, the rural delivery you know in an outside mailbox with the cornfields. The other one was in a very small general store with the post office at one side. I think that I finished these in about '37."

Lithograph - Titled: "Fruit Still Life" - Image Size: 9 1/2" X 13 1/4"

Signed - Framed