About the Artist...

Jaikoo (Jay) Lee...

I was born in South Korea and raised in a farming village. So, my roots are intricately intertwined with the nature as my very own flesh and blood.

As part of a family that owned fields and rice paddies, I ate off of those lands, as it were. When I walked home from my elementary school many miles away because we didn't have a car (no family in the whole region did), I walked another couple of miles, stepped into the muddy water of our rice paddies, and did weeding, constantly plucking leeches (blood-sucking worms) off my legs and tossing them to the dry land. When the harvest time came, I helped my dad and other helpers from the village with harvesting rice, bundling the ripened rice plants into sheaves. When home, I would go over to the garden by the side of our house, gather leaves, yard trimmings, and food scraps on to our compost, and look after it until the next planting season. Thus, every day I lived in nature and with nature.

I walked to a next bigger town to a middle school, and then our family moved to Seoul, the Capital City of South Korea, so I could attend high school. And then I would go to a university there, graduating with a B.A. in English.

Then, at long last, fulfilling my life-long dream, I came to the United States of America and studied at Harvard University Divinity School and completed my studies there with the Master of Divinity Degree.

After many years of serving at churches as pastor in a number of states and in Canada, I also worked with hospices in the East Coast as well as the West Coast as hospice chaplain.

What about my artwork? It had not seen the light of the day yet! Well, it had been set aside for the time being while I was doing all these many other things! Like raising a family! But my deep awareness of my divine gift of artistic creativity...it never died, but simmering, at times, boiling...

Then came COVID-19 Pandemic! One day I was called into the office of the hospice I was working with as chaplain in Santa Barbara. California. I was told I was no longer needed and to leave the computer at the office and head for home!

Long story short, my wife and I took a long 3,000-mile drive east and arrived at the Philadelphia area. Through countless nights of tossing and turning and through many months of searching and checking, I took the courage to declare to the world, "I am an artist!" A few days later I came across these words of Vincent van Gogh, "If you hear a voice within you saying 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced." I heard myself saying, "Wow"!