Canvas: Lingering Themes

By Paulette Perhach

In her living room studio, Fang Ling Lee paints a slick black stroke, taking her hand on a curving trail to the top corner of the canvas, where the hair of two beauties flows in the air.

The figures, naked and swaddled together in sweeps of gray paint, stare out of their speckled world back at their creator, working in bum-around clothes, her feet bare but for splotches of paint.

Finishing her ladies, she signs “Ling” in pink oil pastel. A finished piece calls for a celebratory cigarette.

The girl in the painting was working as a hostess at Sonny’s, where Ling followed her around, assuring her she wasn’t a crazy person, until she agreed to model for her.

If that’s not the way other artists do things, then OK.

Ling, 25, never needed to be like other artists to know she was one.

“I’m an art show brat,” she says. “My sister and I were born at the art shows, practically.”

Her father started a clay shop right off the boat from China in the streets of New York City and worked up from there until traveling art shows became the family way of life.

Her parents moved the family from New York to Palm Coast in 1990, maintaining their art and travels as Ling and her sister grew up.

Ling says art saved her from a traditional Chinese upbringing.

“I didn’t get the violin classes, didn’t get the piano classes, didn’t have to be in the spelling bee, didn’t have to get straight A’s,” says Ling. “But I did have to be an artist.”

Punishments in the Lee house were not of timeout minutes, but of how many cat sculptures the girls had to make after school.

“That was my violin class, helping my parents out with art,” says Ling.

When her father caught her with cigarettes and bad-girl paraphernalia in high school, he threatened to make her help at art shows instead of go to college.

“I was like, ‘Noooooo!’” says Ling.

A proud drop-out of Flagler’s fine arts program, Ling lived for two years in St. Augustine, making a living guiding horse-and-carriage tours.

When a friend told her he wanted to do an erotic art show, she painted her first real piece, a grayscale impressionist work of her licking her own nipple.

“When I first started, I just wanted to do erotic art,” says Ling. “I settled for painting flowers.”

Intimidated by the need to please customers, she painted colorful flora for her first show in 2003.

“In the Florida market, if you don’t paint palm trees or beaches, you’re screwed,” she says.

Now, having moved on to her current style, sans petals or palms, she spends her summers taking pieces to art shows to Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities, sleeping in the van with her woodworker, bodyguard and boyfriend, Tim Coleman.

“I want my paintings to sell everywhere. I don’t want to paint palm trees for Florida, paint nudes for Chicago and paint cactus for Texas,” she says.

Her current work involves a process she and her father developed, splattering paint in the back yard.

The background creates a dream-like setting, says Ling, upon which she paints figures at times coupled with animals, such as a woman lounging against a purple octopus in her recent piece, “The Beach.”

“I like the fusion of the two – the really abstract and the somewhat realist,” says the artist. “A lot of them are personal, like wishful thinking, nightmares, happy dreams, hopes. I’ve been getting darker, and I like it.”

She sells her work for prices she can’t afford. Getting ready to change her subjects, she hopes financial success will follow her trend toward the erotic market. Her first peepshow will be EXXXOTICA at Miami Beach in April.

“I want to be in that industry, but with my clothes on,” she says. “The people in the industry, I want them to be my clients.”

She can see Jenna Jameson coming home to a Ling Lee piece on her wall.

“I would love that,” she says. And what makes sex better than flowers, says Ling, is “the freedom and the power, like feminist power, in it.”

With several years of commercial success behind her, she’s confident she can maintain her artistic lifestyle, asking of it only enough income to get by and enjoy life.

“I know I’ll be known and probably die young,” she says. “That’s OK with me.”

See more work at fanglinglee.com