My work is grounded in individual perception—my way of seeing, understanding, and interpreting people, places, and experiences. Before becoming an artist, I trained and worked as a therapist, and that way of moving through the world continues to shape how I approach painting. As a therapist, you learn to observe closely, identify patterns, question gently, and sit with complexity. You suspend moral judgment and rigid logic in favor of understanding. Much of the work feels like acting as an analogue image corrector or a search engine for identity—assisting others in seeing themselves with greater clarity and acceptance.

Over time, I found myself constrained by systems that demanded fixed labels: good or bad, sick or healthy. Clinical language—long, multi-syllabic diagnoses designed to create clarity and structure—often felt reductive. Rather than fostering understanding, these terms raised more questions and reinforced a culture that emphasizes difference over shared humanity. This tension ultimately led me away from clinical practice and toward painting as a more elastic and humane language.

I paint and manipulate archetypal imagery to abstract ideas of self and place. My work is influenced by the Pictures Generation and its critical engagement with mass media, appropriation, and mediated images. I draw from shared visual sources—printed material, screenshots, and social media feeds—images that already carry collective meaning. By reworking these familiar images through collage and material intervention, I question how identity is constructed, consumed, and flattened through reproduction.

I describe my works as relief paintings, situating them within a long art-historical lineage that includes ancient bas-relief, Renaissance sculptural friezes, and modernist explorations of shallow space. Historically, relief occupies a liminal position between painting and sculpture—neither fully illusionistic nor fully autonomous as object. This intermediary status is central to my practice. By introducing physical depth while maintaining a frontal pictorial orientation, relief disrupts the optical coherence of painting while resisting the total spatial autonomy of sculpture.

The layered, three-dimensional surfaces function as both structure and metaphor. Each fragment is built up, cut away, or repositioned, creating a physical record of accumulation and revision. These layers operate like breaths or moments of contact—each one carrying a trace of shared humanity. The relief format slows down looking, requiring the viewer to navigate shadows, edges, and interruptions, much like the process of coming to understand another person over time.

I intentionally disrupt clarity and soften representation. By assembling fragments into a composite whole, I construct a visual puzzle that reflects how identity is experienced rather than how it is categorized. The work resists clean divisions between sick and healthy, fixed and fluid, instead offering a space where complexity and contradiction can coexist.

At times, I return to the same person or place across multiple works, using different reference points in time. In doing so, I acknowledge that change is constant—not only in those I depict, but in our perceptions and understanding as well. The relief becomes a site where image, material, and memory intersect, holding space for transformation rather than resolution.

Lee Spitz (b. Detroit, MI) graduated from Scripps College in 2010, Received her Master’s in Family Therapy and Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University in 2018. Lee attended Art Center School of Design MFA program in 2020. Lee currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.