Tanya Hayes Lee

Artist’s Statement

I am a landscape painter—both observer and participant, intricately tied to earth, sea, and sky. My connection to the landscape is not just visual but deeply physical, bound by bone, blood, and heartbeat.

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, I had the woods, lakes, swamps, and hills as my endless playground. Those spaces offered the freedom to wander, get lost, and eventually find my way home. Even now, I move through the world in much the same way—walking mile upon mile through cities, marshes, and forests. The landscapes I traverse have changed, but my instinct to immerse myself in them, to move silently and observe, remains constant.

As an artist, I am captivated by the physicality of paint—its essence as a material. Paint—pigment and binder—how does it respond to the canvas or panel, to brushes, palette knives, rags, or fingers? How does it interact with light, shadow, temperature, and humidity?

Paint itself is born from the landscape. For millennia, pigments have been created from earth, stone, metal, and minerals—the very elements of the natural world. Ancient earth pigments like red and yellow ochre, sienna, and umber date back hundreds of thousands of years. They were used in funeral rites and to create the Paleolithic rock art of Lascaux and Altamira. Ultramarine blue, once a rare treasure made from crushed lapis lazuli, symbolized divinity in depictions of the Virgin Mary. Later, the cadmiums—brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges—emerged from 19th-century discoveries and found their way into the works of the Impressionists.

These pigments are more than just color; they are particles of the earth, created from the same cosmic processes that formed the stars, planets, and ourselves. The heavy metals, like iron, came from distant suns, and the same elemental matter that shapes landscapes also shapes us. Eventually, every fragment of our being will return to the cycles of matter and energy, becoming part of the land, sea, and sky once more.

Through painting, I explore these connections. I seek to understand our place in time and space—how we are anchored, or perhaps unanchored, in the vastness of existence. Where do we stand? And why?

These questions have followed me since childhood, through the certainty of youth and now into my seventies. I no longer believe these mysteries can be fully unraveled through reason, imagination, emotion, or faith.

What I do believe is that I have a process.

I am a landscape painter.

Bio

Tanya Hayes Lee studied studio art at the Mass College of Art, Scottsdale Artist School, and Northern Arizona University. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lee’s greatest inspirations include the nineteenth-century painters George Innes, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable, twentieth-century icons Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson and Alice Neel, and many contemporary artists.

Awards

Newburyport Art Association Art Adventure Grant, 2023

Cambridge Arts Council Community-Supported Arts Grant, 2017

Represented by

13 Forest Gallery, 167A Mass. Ave., Arlington, MA 02474.

Alpers Fine Art, 8 Dock Square, Rockport, MA 01966.

Go Native Gallery, 23 N. Main St., Concord, NH 03301