Thad Lee

'Bluebells of the Second Spring' - abstract landscape photography - floral

2022

Thad Lee is an award-winning filmmaker, a writer of essays, screenplays, and poetry, and a versatile photographer. He earned English and Philosophy degrees from the University of Mississippi and an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of New Orleans. His education includes a poetry workshop in Italy and film studies in Los Angeles, New York, and Spain. Thad was recently honored by the Mississippi Arts Commission with an Artist’s Fellowship in Media Arts. He lives with his visual-artist wife, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, in Oxford, Mississippi. Thad’s current nature photographs are part of a series called "Murmurations" created in conversation with Carlyle Wolfe Lee’s paintings about their shared experiences in the landscape. By immersing his lens in layers of growth, Thad examines abstract patterns in the natural world. His photographs record veils and blots of color alongside clear and intricate details. The result is an enchanting marriage of the familiar with the mysterious. Thad initially developed his on-going series of Moon Paintings as props after writing a screenplay set in a glass hotel on the moon. Inspired by Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, the Moon Paintings are photographs painted with light. To make them, Thad sets a long exposure in low-light and moves his camera with bold gestures. The Moon Paintings are varied, colorful, and completely abstract.