Pat and Veronica Lee

Veronica Casares Lee

• Veronica Casares Lee 
• As an artist I’m inspired by the vitality of nature and the potential of women and growing children. Much of my early work features images of women, while more recent work incorporates botanical and climate-related images.
• I’m very influenced by a sense of place. The culture of New Orleans is a new fascination for me, its music and second line celebrations, and its vernacular architecture, the humble yet beautiful houses of its neighborhoods.
• I tend to approach my work without developing a strictly defined concept, which seems confining to me. Instead, I prefer to let the work proceed unplanned, unfolding as it goes, developing from unconscious inspiration into fulfillment.
• I love playing with different materials, and this has given me proficiency in a variety of media and skills. Colors in my world may bring unconscious inspiration – often after completing a project I realize a dominating color scheme was influence by the colors in my environment.

Pat Lee

• Studioleep 
• I have a cartoonist sensibility. There tends to be humorous elements in my work regardless of the subject matter. I often depict animals in my work because of the obvious archetypes they represent. I'm especially fond of the rooster: to me, he seems the best representation of masculine folly.
• My work focuses mostly on the human condition and our social conditioning. I'm fascinated by our contradictory impulses, our egos, our ideologies and the length we will go to defend them. The question of how we maneuver a technology that is growing exponentially with what is essentially still a hunter/gatherer brain is also interesting. What are we as a race going to evolve into? These are some of the musings that have found their way into my head and my work, and I look forward to exploring these and other topics further.
• I work primarily in clay, but have also used resin, fiberglass, wood and metal. I rarely start a piece without some idea of what I want to achieve. Depending on the complexity of the sculpture, I'll make multiple sketches from different angles to establish a very general guideline, and work out structural/aesthetic issues. I use clay slabs for my figurative and ceramic sculpture. I'll usually start with the head, hands and feet; modeling each separately as individual sculptures. This allows me to focus on each appendage's gestural and emotional possibility. Often, one of these parts will dictate the overall posture and mood of the whole sculpture. Once all are attached, I'll use a variety of rubs, commercial glazes, oil paints and resins to finish the work.