Pamela Lee |
"Fifty-six years of events and opportunities have influenced the direction of my art, but childhood in my parent's house provided the foundation for the art itself -- an environment of Joy in the deciphering of the mysterious, in the diversity of people and places, in the desire to know 'what lies beyond the next hill', and in the reverence for all things found in empty places. Within the heroic challenges of manned space exploration, the elemental themes of vision, sacrifice, defiance and survival provide metaphors for beliefs I hold about the future of this planet and the immutable essence of the human spirit." Born in 1949, Pamela Lee grew up on the University of Iowa campus and around the less traveled areas of the Midwest and Canada. Life revolved around family, campus and her father's insatiable wanderlust. A family vacation to the Southwest resulted in relocation to Tucson, Arizona in 1961. The "close to the bone" landscapes of the Four Corner states so completely resonated with her, she still considers the area home. The family's wide ranging interests provided a supportive environment for her own interests -- primarily art. Pamela received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1970 from the University of Arizona. She moved to California shortly afterwards where she worked as an advertising Designer/Illustrator in San Francisco. In 1972, she was hired as an Art Director by Gallo Winery and moved to Modesto, California. While at Gallo, she conducted a part-time freelance business until she quit in 1979 to supplement her art education with a semester's worth of illustration at Pasadena Art Center School of Design. Completing her instruction, she returned to Modesto and former San Francisco accounts as a full time illustrator eventually swapping out regional clients for New York publishers. Pamela began producing space art after accepting an illustration commission from Bill Hartmann in 1979 -- a decade after being introduced to Bill's own astronomical paintings -- enjoying the requisite research and opportunity for vicarious exploration. Her paintings quickly became less about alien vistas and more about the human experience of manned space exploration. Still new to the astronomical art field, she attended the Hawaii space art workshop in 1981, rejoined workshop artists in Death Valley in 1983 and attended subsequent IAAA workshops at Johnson Space Center in 1987, in Iceland in 1988 and the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1990. In 1985, Pamela was invited to join the NASA Art Program for Discovery's launch. In 1986, she was invited to tour space and cultural facilities throughout Russia, Ukraine and Georgia with the Young Astronauts/Young Cosmonauts Exchange. In Star City, she was privileged to present her Young Astronauts Council commissioned painting to the director of the Yuri Gagarin Museum. The following year, she attended the "Space Futures Forum" in Moscow as one of five invited artists in Dr. Carl Sagan's Planetary Society entourage. In 1989, she attended the Association of Space Explorers Congress in Rihyad, Saudi Arabia as one of four invited artist/exhibitors. Believing the NASA Art Collection should include works by Soviet artists, Pamela drew on contacts in the USSR Union of Artists and Glavcosmos to draft an invitation to NASA. In 1990, she and Union of Artist representatives presented an itinerary to NASA Art Program Director Bob Schulman, facilitating the first artist exchange between the NASA and Intercosmos fine arts programs. In 1991, as a member of the NASA art team, she attended a manned Soyuz TM-13 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. As a Founding and Board of Trustees member, Pamela participated in the formation of the International Association for the Astronomical Arts as a nonprofit organization, in the initial discussions with the USSR Union of Artists regarding collaborative workshops and drafted, in association with The Planetary Society and The Association of Science-Technology Centers, the proposal and budget for the eventual series of IAAA/USSR Union of Artists workshops that culminated in a touring space art exhibition. She has lectured about astronomical art as a genre and it's relevance to exploration to private organizations and schools. Between 1991 and 1993, her one-woman show "Visions of Other Worlds" toured US art and science museums. Two of her miniatures were flown aboard a NASA space shuttle in 1985 and another painting on parachute silk aboard the Soviet Space Station MIR in 1991. These were used to query astronauts about the difference between true colors, as seen from orbit, and colors based on photo reference. Selected for numerous group exhibitions, her work has toured museums and galleries in the former Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Europe and North America. Among these exhibitions are the Society of Illustrators "Science Fiction: 1980s And Beyond" in 1984, the NASA Art Program "Visions of Flight: A Retrospective from the NASA Art Collection" from 1988-91, and the ARTRAIN "Artistry of Space" from 1999-2001. Her work has appeared in the television productions "Cosmos -- Year of the Comet", "Future Flight", "The Mars Declaration", "Adventures in Space", "Life on Ice" and "Beyond 2000". Pamela is one of several IAAA artists profiled in an award winning film "Space Visions" and the cover artist featured in the WSFP-TV production "The Publishing Game". Her illustrations and paintings have been published in magazines, limited edition and mass publication novels, general interest science books, textbooks and the space art compilations "In The Stream Of Stars" by William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller, "Visions Of Space" by David A. Hardy and the sadly doomed Planetary Society/NASA/Intercosmos MARS 96 mission to the planet Mars. Her work has been selected for publication in the Society of Illustrators Annuals, Art Direction's Creativity Annual and the American Illustration Annual. She is co-author of "Out Of The Cradle" with William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller and contributing artist to their book "Cycles Of Fire". Pamela recently rejoined fellow IAAA artists at the 2005 Death Valley Workshop and is looking forward to future workshops. Pamela Lee is an IAAA Fellow. ALSO SEE:
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