News: my studio will be open as part of the West Iowa Art Studio Tours taking place on April 18.
Lee Shiney is an abstract painter, photographer, kinetic sculptor, and mixed media artist, with a history in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and in art education. Formerly a lifelong Kansan, since 2014 Lee and his Iowa-born and raised wife, Lajean, have been repurposing the 15,000 square foot old Ar-We-Va school building in Arcadia, Iowa, into their home and studio spaces.
I grew up in a Kansas town of 400, and have come full-circle to currently living in an Iowa town of 400. Coming of age in rural America, before the onset of corporate farming, meant going around and around in circles on tractors and combines, usually without a cab. Those days were very hands-on, fixing things on the fly, with plenty of time to think while focusing on an ever-present horizon.
All of that set the stage for a fascination with scientific exploration and engineering, being self-taught in commercial screen printing, old-school and new-digital graphic design, videography, web development, running a gallery, helping create and present a STEM interactive art project for hundreds of grade school students, and basically being serial entrepreneurial. Throw in tangents like roasting coffee, blending whiskey, cancer treatment in 2001 (update: and again in 2025), and the necessity of currently being a part-time maintenance person for a 15,000 square foot building, and you get life and art that are very much “invent it as you go.”
My paintings emerge from non-traditional methods and tools I design myself: turntables, spray devices, mechanical apparatuses that become collaborators in the work. I push mediums past their expected limits, letting process drive discovery.
The results reference cycles of time, illness, and the cosmos — intimate and expansive at once. All of this I now refer to as Positive Space: a deliberate counterpoint to darkness, using bright color and circular energy to locate and illuminate what is human and alive. My art is an ongoing experiment — curious, hands-on, and perpetually in motion.