Desarae Lee

Desarae Lee is a fine artist, author, and illustrator from Salt Lake City, Utah. Her art has appeared in galleries and art shows across the US and she has won numerous awards for her work including Best of Show, Best Illustrator, and Featured Artist. She has authored and illustrated several books and serves as a founding board member at Salt Lake City’s Downtown Artist Collective, where she can occasionally be found teaching drawing or printmaking.

Desarae’s technique revolves around using line to create value and texture. Working primarily with pen and ink, Desarae balances exact, meticulous line-work with natural, flowing compositions. Over time, her work has developed to include watercolor, tea staining, and printmaking. This shift results in more organic drawings that still maintain her original intricacy.

Influenced by personal trauma and struggles with depression and anxiety disorders, Desarae creates work that revolves around themes of finding humor in pain, beauty in the grotesque, and light in the darkness. As comfortable referencing geek culture as she is bearing the depths of her soul, Desarae’s work ranges in theme but is always, as she says, “an attempt to connect the hidden places in myself to the hidden places in the viewer, to somehow create a bridge of communication over the immense expanse of our differing perceptions, beliefs, and experiences.”

When she is not drawing or printing, Desarae can be found roaming the Rocky Mountains of Utah with her ever-patient partner Jared and her stubborn Schnauzer Boris.