- Paintings of imagination, art with poetry
“Painting is a language and a song to me, and I am Leslie, Romain Garie’s passionate woman who believes in absolute love. Paintings are also ‘poetry’, the traces of my soul written in the air.” Seawoo Lee writes . She is a painter, poet, and book designer who loves flowers, drawing, and poetry. Her new experiments and endeavors become her experiences, creative inspirations, and ideas, which are then transformed into art with poetry on canvas. She wants to be a beautiful legend, not a star, by revealing her essence, her persona through her work. “Love of my life” is a poem and a painting that tells a poignant story. “I experience the dramatic passion of inner emotions erupting outward as the paintings on the canvas come and go. I feel that all of these acts turn inward and make art blossom.”
▲ Artist Seawoo Lee |
Paintings, poetry, and design are meant to come together, to blossom
She imagines creating a mauve sky with a large paintbrush and soaring into a time of passion as a bird in a pink, red, and white sky. She also wants flowers to respond to spring, water, sun, and wind, opening their petals and spreading their wings in a fluttering motion. On her first solo invitational exhibition at Megaline in 2007, “The Inner Me,” she recollects, “They were paintings that I had struggled with, as if my passion had been consumed while making love to them, but the beautiful truth ‘The Inner Me’ was well received by the audience.” She has been honored with the “100 People Who Shined in Korea” Award for Western Painting, and most notably, the “Writer of the Year” award from the President of the Korean Arts and Culture Association last year. She counts the Romanian-Greek Art Exchange Invitational Exhibition, the World Art Invitational Exhibition in New York, and the International Exhibition in Paris, France as some of her most memorable moments. ‘Love flower’ was the winner of the Artist of the Year Award at the 2022 World Artists’ Exchange Association Creative Competition. At the Lee Sea Woo art show, hosted by SBS announcer Sowon Shim, she said, “It was like a world beyond fantasy, where colors and drawings glowed, as if she was wearing glass shoes and carrying a large rose, invited to a party like a festival and kissing the new petals.”
She was also selected as a ‘featured’ artist on NAVER Grafolio, and her paintings and poems were featured on NAVER’s main screen. Recently, she won the “Mid-career Artist in Western Painting” category at the 2023 Korea Culture Management Awards. “I’m honored that all these wonderful things have happened like a dream. We are made to blossom, not shrink, and I want to live an exciting life with beautiful passions, and I want to be an amazing artist who touches people with beautiful paintings and poetry.” She is now preparing for a spring exhibition held in Rome in 2024, showcasing colorful, intense and exotic flowers.
이지현 기자 jinayi12@daum.net