“Farm” (1985) epitomizes Lee’s painting style through the early 1980s. His spacious farm in Paju, a college admissions gift from his father, was a favorite subject matter throughout his life, serving as his studio and source of inspiration. The trees in the front are sharply contoured with lines and then separated with Lee’s characteristic planes filled with primary colors, with the background behind the trees divided into a field, mountains, and the sky. The fields and trees are centered on the color green and dynamism is expressed through long and short upward brushstrokes. The sky painted in light pink creates a contrast with the lower part of the painting, at the same time allowing the flowers and leaves of spring to vividly come to life.
Lee Dai Won (1921-2005) showed artistic talent early enough to be awarded the Special Selection Award at the National Students’ Art Competition sponsored by the Chosun Ilbo while he was at Kyungbock High School. However, Lee majored law at Seoul National University in line with his parents’ expectation. After graduation, Lee took up his career as an artist. As founder and director of Bando Gallery, the first gallery in Korea, in 1971, he played a pivotal role in Korean art circles. Lee had served as a professor at Hongik university’s College of Art from 1967 to 1982, dean of the College of Art from 1972 to 1986, and president of Hongik University in 1980. He took office as chairperson of the National Academy of Arts of the Republic of Korea in 1993. Lee was the recipient of the National Academy of Arts Award in 1991 and Gold Crown Order of Cultural Merit in 1995.
Lee Dai Won dedicated his whole career to painting natural scenery in a rhythmic style using warm and bright colors, unshaken by stylistic changes in Korean art scene. He wanted to express the beauty of Korea as well as an affluent utopia through his paintings that depicted familiar landscapes of farms, orchards, mountains, fields, and ponds. His landscape paintings are filled with vitality and dynamism despite their simplicity, due to the rhythmic way he expressed scenery through the use of primary colors that defied laws of perspective and by freely drawing unrestrained colored lines. The influence of Fauvism pervaded in his early works, but following his first world trip in 1957, he developed his unique style to depict the main subject matter through clear lines and fill the entire canvas with countless dots in primary colors. This style is assumed to have been influenced by Impressionism, but the elongated brushstrokes in his paintings that defy the laws of perspective are closer to those in ink-paintings than in Impressionist paintings. Endeavoring to introduce traditional Eastern aesthetic concepts and legacies into modern art, Lee actually studied oriental painting techniques, including learning to draw the “Four Gracious Plants,” from Noh Soo-hyeon, also known under the penname Shimsan. During the 1960s, Lee introduced his own method of integrating calligraphy, ink-paintings of the Joseon dynasty, and the drawing technique of Qing dynasty China into his paintings, thus developing a unique drawing style of his own. In this vein, Lee Sang-beom also known under the penname Chungjeon, described Lee’s work as, “Oriental paintings painted with Western pigments.” Until the mid-1980s, Lee’s work was characterized by rhythmical contrasts between sharp contours of subject matter and wide color-fields with dots drawn with primary colors along the margins of a canvas. In contrast, after the late 1980s, his work is characterized by further alleviated tension and contrast between linear depiction and pointillism, with pointillism being the main style.
