The horses in artist Joyce Lee's paintings are not just accessories to her landscapes. Nor do her landscapes serve as convenient backdrops for her horses. Under her masterful use of brush and palette knife, she integrates all subject matter with a refined sense of light and composition. Horses are one with the landscape, details of foliage, topography, geological features and sky. Subtle nuances of horse form, color and equipage can harmonize or contrast with their surroundings. This holistic effect is a consequence of having been immersed most of her life in the landscape and the horses as well as setting an artistic standard where both the landscape and the horses have equal importance and impact. Unlike most modern painters of the West, the artist's roots spring directly out of the very essence of Western landscape and livestock culture. Growing up on remote ranches in Wyoming, she witnessed her cowboy father's seasonal battles with the elements, as well as his small pleasures taken in pride of rugged tasks well done. Joyce herself experienced a childhood of exhilarating moments of horse riding and ranch work interspersed with long periods of quiet solitude -- moments that nurtured the artist in her. "There was a period of time in my growing up years when my family moved around a lot, from one ranch situation to another. Art was always with me, sometimes set aside for months, but still available," Joyce recalls. "Horses were a bigger part of my activities for many years, before and during my married life. They were a fairly constant thread. One of the benefits of riding was the opportunity to be out in the environment and soaking up the landscape, all parts of it. A vivid memory I have is of a drizzly morning wrangling horses. I rode out and came back with a memory, strong and simple -- of riding across the soft earth among the green spring grass and the sage, lots of sage. The smell of wet sage over rolling hills under a low, gray sky stays with me. This is just one of many memories from the back of a horse that I know influences how and what I paint today." Mark Twain opined that the novelist best able to capture the spirit of a country or region is the native writer who has spent at least twenty-five years engaged in "unconscious absorption" of his place and its people. Though primarily a self-educated painter, Joyce's native experiences bring great depth and sophistication to her work. She would have preferred pursuing a traditional academic training, but understood her midlife transformation to full-time artist would require making up for lost time. She has consistently set benchmarks for maturing and evolving her naturalism to the highest standards to supplant.

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