Lee Chisholm

Interview with Katie Bonadies, September 2025

Pictured: RWS member, Lee Chisholm. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Lee Chisholm is a painter who, for most of his life, has worked in watercolor, with the occasional exception of pen & ink, pastel, or charcoal drawing. Recently, he has begun to explore painting with acrylics. Lee has been a member of RWS since it was located on Cove Street, over a decade ago.

For years Lee painted watercolors out in the open, en plein air. Sometimes he still does. One reason he enjoys it is because things happen. Someone rides by on a bike… or a bird passes through the picture plane, and he will capture them in the moment. “Somehow, art has a way of memorializing our experiences. What’s ‘outside,’ what’s ‘inside’ (how you feel about it)—these interplay and interpenetrate; artists unavoidably end up leaving memorials, big or small, of a particular time, of a place, of their person. Looked at historically, the centuries and millennia of human art are windows into the evolution of human consciousness.” 

Chisholm, Lee. Cliffs by Sea. Acrylic.

In 2012 Lee became very active in the climate movement. His work took a focused turn to banners and signs for street theater and political protests. Still more recently, he started an Indivisible chapter in Freeport. Lee used to practice civil law, not infrequently arguing in front of the Maine Supreme Court. He is painfully aware of the time we're in since the election. One of the mainstays of his art practice is the Artist Rapid Response Team (ARRT). ARRT is a group of artists that meet monthly to paint large banners for various progressive social change nonprofit organizations in the state of Maine. A vintage 1960s poster from Bread & Puppet Theater hangs in his home reads, “Art is the inside of the world.” Lee thinks that statement is truer than true.

In the mid-1980s, Lee and his wife started the Waldorf School in Freeport. Though he taught history, math, geography, and science, he found a way to incorporate art into every curriculum, “It pulls things out of the abstract and into the immediate. The feelings get involved and the blood pumps a little faster.” With every new theme Lee would draw an image in colored chalk on the blackboard to whet the appetite for the kids as they came into the classroom. In Waldorf teaching you keep the main lesson book, and every day a new concept is brought up. Students make art with every lesson, and at the end of the year they have their own textbook made from the pictures and writing they’ve done. Through art, Lee says, things become more memorable. When he looks at his own paintings he can remember where he was and how it happened to turn out that way, the bends and turns in the road that made it fun.

Making art is all about process for Lee and, after all of his years teaching, he firmly believes everyone is an artist. Lee’s process is playful, and he has gradually pushed himself to become more expressive in his painting. Now retired from teaching, Lee has continued his habit of coming to the studios in the evening—“after school.” Most evenings he arrives not knowing what he’s going to create. He’s inspired by the quiet around the studios. The large, silent space feels like one big office, an invitation to work. This end-of-day stillness helps him. “The creative process has to be centered, you can’t wobble. You have to be clear and, somehow, not depart from the driving nature of your impulse, but remain open to where it leads.” Sometimes it is just mark-making that eventually becomes representational over time. 

Chisholm, Lee. Scavenger. Acrylic.

Chisholm, Lee. John. Watercolor.

When Lee was a kid, he was a devout fisherman. He lived near a couple of farm ponds, and on a weekend or summer evening or morning, he would walk down the hill and pluck some worms out of a corn field and go down with a bobber and throw it in the pond. “There, the bobber would sit. If you were patient enough, and waited long enough, it would go ‘dunk, dunk’, ‘dunk, dunk’. The heart would quicken to that rhythm–you knew you were onto something. And suddenly the bobber would go under, and you’d set the hook. You never knew who or what kind of fish you’d bring up from the depths.” His evening art practice reminds him of that.” 

Lee loves to see other people's “stuff” at Running With Scissors. For him, it can be experienced as colorful conversation all over the studios. He has walked into the studios and seen something out of the corner of his eye–he doesn’t look back because that little glimpse has sparked his imagination–and an image comes up and he goes and makes it. “We leave footprints, all the time, and marks of our passage through life. Even offhand comments to a friend or acquaintance, or brief exchanges with someone in a store—these leave marks. Art is a way of making marks that is a little more focused, more open, more sensitive. It’s wonderful when somebody’s made something with a brush or a banjo or a pen. That is a contribution to all the rest of us; it’s like a conversation with the world. The artist speaks and somebody’s there to listen.”

Chisholm, Lee. Three Watchers. Acrylic.

Five years ago, this past July, after nearly fifty years of marriage, Lee’s wife, the love of his life, died. Suddenly a widower, Lee had to learn how to be with her in a new and different way. The grief was inescapable. One of the best ways he coped was to, each day, immerse himself in art. He found that when he was deep within his creative process, he would forget everything but the creating. It was balm for the ache within; and he had fun too. It simply made him feel good. “I come out of here having caught a little fish, most nights, sometimes two, and I don’t take myself too seriously. Painting at RWS studios, in my experience, is good for the child, the man, and the child in the man.” He often leaves the studios having created one to two paintings over the course of a few hours. 

If you are interested in getting involved with the Indivisible chapter in Freeport or Artists Rapid Response Team, email Lee at lelandchisholm@gmail.com.