Molly Leimontas
Artist Robin Lee (right) at last year’s exhibit.
For a sense of the creative output of one of Madison’s one-of-a-kind characters, pop into Robin Lee’s Feb. 8 Retrospect, a DIY event the multimedia artist puts on each year at an east-side warehouse to share his whimsical drawings and poems with the public.
At last year’s event, cartoon images hung from white walls, dangling on wooden clothespins. To display his remarkable number of works, additional makeshift walls (2x4s cemented into buckets) held two clotheslines of colored printer paper covered in poems. A microphone was set up in the corner of the room.
Normally, this room is the rehearsal space for Madison’s Brazilian-style percussion group, The Handphibians. But for the last four years, Robin Lee has transformed it into a DIY gallery for what he calls “wacky art.”
“I’m self-taught, so nothing looks how I’d like it to or how someone properly trained would do it, but that might give it some of the charm,” says Lee, who has been making and selling visual art for more than 15 years and is also a busy musician.
In addition to his annual self-produced shows, Lee vends at neighborhood festivals, including the Willy Street Fair. He curates the bizarre websites/photo galleries Beards from Below and leftoverbags.com. He hosts events such as the annual Fun-Raiser at Tenney Park every June and emcees People Fest at Driftless Music Gardens. He sings with several local bands: Birds Birds Birds; Warm Wet Rag (a “sincere” Ween tribute band); and Better Yeti.
Lee’s cartoon-like watercolor images are a riot of colors and shapes — and often contain larger messages. One painting features Arctic animals (walrus, polar bear and seal) rowing a wooden boat, looking quite scared. In yet another, a gray robot cares for a swaddled newborn baby.
At times, dark messages are mixed with fanciful, and even beautiful images. For example, Uncle Sam, riding a Segway, sighs while looking over a land of stumps littered with abandoned oil barrels and trash. The background sky is aglow with the colors of a sunset.
“Try and laugh through darkness,” Lee says. “If we are doomed we might as well get some chuckles in while we can. Hope against defeat. Don’t take things too seriously.”
At the event, guests are invited to participate by unclipping a poem from the gallery and reading it into the microphone. This year, there are 180 rhyming poems, 100 “wacky art” paintings ranging in theme, 400 photographs and chili, Lee says. He began hosting annual retrospectives to share his work and help him stay on top of self-imposed deadlines. “It makes it worth doing knowing someone might see it. That alone gives me motivation.”
Robin Lee’s Retrospect is Feb. 8, 2:30-11:30 p.m., at 72 N. Bryan St.
