Mickey Lee is a painter in the forest of her own mind, which is made manifest by paint, canvas, and imagination. She doesn’t exactly set out to accomplish anything when she paints, other than to let her subconscious reveal itself as she follows the path.

Colors. Forms. After a while, something takes shape—something lovely or sinister.

Lee is an artist that seems to embody the idea of the close encounter. Each painting feels like we are stepping into her spirit. Yet, her subject matter is all too natural—primarily that of women and animals intermingling. As we observe her work, we can’t help but ask ourselves: Why? Such is the beauty of the close encounter—it leaves us more curious than before.

Did that just happen?

Will it happen again?

“I don’t go into a painting trying to accomplish anything,” Lee says, suntanned and clear-eyed from her current travels to the South of France, “but the painting itself begins to reveal itself. And I suppose my job is to complete it in a way that is accurate to the story that it is trying to tell. I sometimes feel that I’m the follower rather than the leader as I’m painting.”

Lee’s work has been cultivated through many years of practice, having started creating art at a young age in her rural hometown of Forest Grove, Oregon, and moving on to get her MFA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited across the globe, from a solo show at One Trick Pony Gallery (Los Angeles) last January, to a wonderfully received show at The Journal Gallery (New York City), to Little Town, currently on display at Loyal Gallery (Stockholm). From Pacific Northwest forests to Berkeley streets to high-profile exhibitions, Lee walks along a path all her own.

The organic magic of her surroundings creates visions more interesting than any psychedelic drug ever could. “I realized through playing make-believe that animals are such good narrators for trying to convey a message,” Lee tells us, “almost more so than the human figures. You can get away with a lot more by using an animal, like using an evil rabbit as opposed to an evil person.”

Bunny rabbits. Fish. Spiders. Electric blue horses, to name a few.

What world are we inhabiting with Lee? It’s hard to tell. Lee was raised by her father, a woodworker, who “really facilitated my art practice from a younger age.” Lee often depicts women, which she speaks of as a curiosity about what motherhood means, and how she can decipher it through her work.

Thank God for art, for with it we get to ask the questions we may never know the answers to. A liminal space between reality and fantasy living on the edge of our skin.

Thank God for Lee’s art, for with it we ask the impossible questions, only available to be processed through some material divination.

“I try to dive into this really thin line between there being something beautiful and pastoral and idyllic in my paintings,” Lee reveals, “but at the same time as you live with the work and understand it you see how quickly it can turn into something more salacious and sinister.”

The feeling of a close encounter dances in the distance. We see the glow but we don’t know what it is.

Is it something we really want more of?

The challenge is that we don’t know if we want more unless we proceed.

An essence of uncertainty evinced by Lee’s painting “Shipwrecked,” (2024) on display at her most recent show at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm. The image is made up of a woman holding a boat on a beach. A boat representing what? Freedom? Exploration? In the background, we see a sky that could only be painted by someone with a singularly deft hand and multi-faceted mind.

A sky that is mottled. Mottled with daylight? Mottled with darkness? It dances in a kind of bruised colorway, soft yet palpable. Lee toes this line of curiosity, a line that grows rigid and taut again throughout her work. “For a second you see bunnies in the landscape, but the longer you sit, the more there is a melancholy calling to it. I like to play with hot and cold. Beauty/grotesque. Safety/danger. Sexy/innocent. Those dualities. That is a thread that ties everything together.” Lee is young. She is still building a world, a forest. The creatures inhabiting it enter and exit like omens.

“Each work is its own chapter in the grand scheme of this very big book that I’m conceiving,” Lee says. “My last show dealt with a lot of hedonism and gluttony and oral fixations, like a toothache of a show, saturated and over the top, and a story of ‘be careful of too much of a good thing.’ But the new show takes place in this entirely different world: in this seaside setting, and it’s more quiet and subdued. So as you look at my exhibitions and groups of work they read as if you’re reading one chapter after the next.”

As the book unfolds, we don’t know where we are going, yet we are still curious, which may be the best kind of story. Yet, though we don’t know where we are going, we still feel safe in the arms of Lee. Maybe she is the mother, after all. The mother/woman she keeps revisiting in her paintings, building a life through her work that she can live by.

It’s difficult not to think of Picasso’s early work at his Museum in Barcelona, where one notices a distinct maturation from realism to abstraction within his figures. Similarly, we wonder where Lee may end up. Whether she is cultivating this in her studio in New York City, or on her travels across the globe, the bunnies in Lee’s mind are dancing all the while. The mothers are coddling, the spiders are luminescent. “I’m constantly taking notes, but they are in the form of little sketches,” Lee says, regarding her process, “If I see something that speaks to me or even hear something like a funny phrase. I try to spend a half an hour in the morning drawing, and later on I can look back at my notes and if there is something that speaks to me I can bring it back to the studio.”

And on the subject of spiders, we can’t help but talk about ‘maman,’ the caption for Lee’s painting of a woman holding a very large spider, an incendiary work titled, “Arachnid Embrace” (2023). Upon looking at it, one is jolted immediately. Is it a budding arachnophobia? Is it, again, that wonder of what world we have been thrust into? The work feels fully representative of Lee’s artistic Yin and Yang: the scary mixed with the sublime, the audience having to decipher the meaning for themselves.

“That painting really got people stirring,” Lee says of the piece, “I see it as something that reads really maternal. Of course it references Louise Bourgeois, but I thought it was very sweet and maternal. People were freaked out by the spider. And the woman is pregnant while holding it. The spider is a stand in for a mother, who I didn’t grow up with. A lot of my work is about contemplating what motherhood is, or, having a mom. The spider was kind of about adopting something that could be so so so unlovable, I guess, and being like, ‘I’m here now, you’re safe.’ And giving that maternal quality to something that is usually not wanted.”

Shall we go closer?

Shall we? 

Is the light dimming?

Or is it shining?