ROTARY ART SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENT

Lee Mothes has always loved to draw.  He has owned and operated Oceans and Dreams Art Studio since 1990, primarily working in watercolor and acrylic on canvas.  His work has been exhibited in art centers and museums throughout Wisconsin and he has won numerous awards.  Lee has also been creating a series of what he calls narrative paintings or pictures along with stories, road maps and a book length documentary of an imaginary island called New Island.  Nine years ago, he wrote a guidebook titled The New Island Relocation Guide, and he is currently expanding this into a full-color art book with a story line.  This project involves creating characters, developing a plot, then moving the story as an illustration work of fiction, using about 200 paintings, imagined maps and rewritten text from the original Guide as the background.  To help make this narrative paintings and this book more compelling, Lee wanted to get help from a master in writing fiction.  For creating realistic characters, a well developed plot and sharp, compelling sentences, he found the perfect writing course offered at The Clearing in Ellison Bay for a week long intensive course June 24-30, 2012 called Wring Well – A Workshop For Fiction and Memoir writers by Margaret Hawkins.  Lee received a scholarship from the Arts Scholarship Fund to attend this course.