Mykul Lee grew up outside of Oklahoma City. As a youth, he traveled the world with his family seeking out the premiere museums and galleries. Upon graduating high school in 2002, he got accepted to and attended the University of Oklahoma for fine art. After spending some time at university, he eventually decided that this was not feeding his level of interest any longer. He left school to come to Los Angeles, where he became a full time artist and professional musician. He has completed countless commissions and large scale murals, and also continues to travel the world. He and his wife, who is also a visual artist, recently completed a successful trip to study in the great Florentine museums. They work in their studio 8-12 hours everyday, make monthly trips to San Francisco to study, they go plein air painting constantly, they simply obsess over visual art. Mykul’s work reflects the inspiration he derives from his travels, studies in museums, and appreciation for the great masters of the past and present. Jean Leon-Gerome, John Singer-Sargent, Illya Repin, Ingres, Hals, Henner, Jacques Louis-David, this list could go on forever. Although his work bridges a balance between classical posture and contemporary composition, he is an avid fan of all figurative portraiture. Just as every generation discovers the Beatles for the first time, every new generation also discovers art. Whether it’s new or old, bravura or academic, abstract or representational, art is a universal language and we are linguists. Mykul feels that, although he has a strong appreciation for photo realism, it’s not the photo that he’s interested in duplicating. It’s the motion and expressive quality of the subject. The things that one can do with oil paint drastically enhance the emotion that the viewer draws from the subsequent work. Although alla prima painting plays a firm principle in his work, he does spend much more than just one or two sittings creating paintings. It’s not true alla prima, but it has the heart and soul of such.
