Artospective: Women & Food Series by Lee Price from Elmira, New York.

Jelly Doughnuts - Women & Food Series by Lee Price.

An small Interview with Lee Price.

Who and from where are you?

I was born and raised in Elmira, New York- a small town in upstate New York. Growing up, I lived with my mother and my two older sisters. In our household, women did everything. There were no men's roles because there were no men around. My father had left and, though he continued to live in the same town we did, was not a consistent presence in my life. Both grandfathers had passed away before I was born. No other male relatives lived near by. I attended an all women’s college. All this has shaped my view of the world.

How you got into this?

My mother was a high school art teacher. So from an early age I was introduced to art. She often took us to art museums and galleries. I attended Moore College of Art- an all women’s college. Even back then I focused on making large paintings of myself or my female friends in rooms with food randomly placed throughout the scene- someone holding a bunch of carrots, a banana sitting on a window sill, etc. Back then I wasn’t clear about the connection. However, the relationship between women and food always has been the focus of my work.

What is your driving force?

My ideas are my driving force and my ideas come from what is going on in my life. I think that is what all art is about. You have an idea and you’ve learned a way of making that idea concrete- a way of getting it across to people. One of my favorite quotes is “the more personal, the more universal”. So I have an idea that seems so personally important. I could think of it as self-aggrandizing to spend all my time creating it, but what I’ve found is that I put it out there and so many others resonate with it. It’s a way of connecting with people.

What kind of work you do and why?

These paintings are very personal. They’re self-portraits, so I use myself as the model. Since I was very young I have struggled with issues related to food. I can remember being in grade school, very thin and tall, yet trying to loose weight. A critic once commented, in regard to the subject matter of my paintings, "the women aren't grossly fat or pathetically thin, but their lives seem to be oppressively ruled by food". It would be a very accurate description of the role food has played in my life- bouncing between abstinence and complete loss of control.

In most of my paintings what I want to get across is a sense of distraction. How we grasp for things that distract us from being present when the present is too uncomfortable for us to sit with. How this "checking out" (or compulsion) often creates more harm than if we had just sat with the discomfort in the first place. I think the best ones show not only the negative aspects of this behavior but also the comfort that's found in doing it...and the absurdity of it.