Owen Lee 1922-2002

Owen Lee must have been aware of the commotion out at sea in the dark morning hours of New Year’s Eve 1966. From his vantage point on Elliott Key in Biscayne Bay, lights and sounds would have signaled the foundering of the schooner Mandalay on Long Reef. Flares soared as helicopters lifted 24 people one at a time in ten-foot seas and transported them to Homestead Air Force Base.

The lone occupant of the island for seven years, Owen lived in his hand-built home he named Sea Stairs. 

News reports say locals scavenged the Mandalay in short order. Built in 1928, she was 110 feet of luxury cruise vessel adorned with mahogany, brass, ivory, and teak. Owen rowed out to the wreck, and his booty was pieces of sail on which he began to draw with fabric dye in ball-point tubes. Thus, at age 42 he began the rest of his life as an artist. Having served in World War II and Korea and worked on shrimp boats from Tampa to the Yucatan, his greatest wish was to be recognized as a poet. He said that his drawings were meant to work out ideas explicit in his poetry. Jesuit educated, fascinated by classical literature, lacking formal training, Owen’s fate was to be an outsider artist. 

In 1922 William Owen Lee was born in a frame cottage in Lemon City, Florida, an early Miami neighborhood. A south-Florida native of that vintage is a rarity, and from this uncommon origin he became a social critic and a poet. A small, sinewy man with clear blue eyes, silver hair and intense energy, Owen appeared in Coconut Grove in 1968 with a cache of folded fabric treasures. He had created the pieces while living as the caretaker of a defunct estate on Elliott Key in Biscayne Bay. For a few short years he rented a 20-by-20-foot storefront in “the Grove” on Grand Avenue for $75 a month and named it the Owen Lee Gallery. Here he wrote poetry and created images he called "anti-art."

For four decades Owen continued to draw on fabric and paper and to assemble collages and sculptures. With few resources he managed to spend short periods of time in New York, then San Francisco, seeking recognition as an artist. But success remained out of reach. Seemingly he lived on coffee and cigarettes, and he wore drugstore glasses when he needed to see up close. He wrote phrases, poems and diatribes on his works, his materials were unconventional, and he was led only by his instinct and intellect. Technically he qualifies as an untrained artist, but the range of his work is complex, intricate, sophisticated, angry, profane, occult, and scholarly. 

Owen and his three brothers were brought up by their mother in their tiny rustic subtropical abode. His father left the family when Owen was very young. His mother, an unconventional individual in her own right, had grown up on a coffee plantation in Belize. Owen remembered the horror of surviving the 1926 hurricane in the little house with his mother and brothers. He was so close to one brother that he described the two of them as Damon and Pythias. When that brother was hit and killed by a bus as he and Owen were walking home from school, their mother was so filled with grief that she followed his coffin to the cathedral on bloodied knees. Her sisters had her committed for exhibiting this extreme behavior, and the boys had to live with their more ordinary aunts until their mother was released. No doubt such childhood experiences contributed to the bitterness toward the Catholic church that Owen carried throughout his life and is exhibited in his work.

Owen was educated at Jesuit High School in Miami and Spring Hill, a Jesuit College in Mobile, Alabama. He joined the Navy, one imagines to escape to a larger world, and served in World War II and Korea. After his discharge, always gravitating to the sea, he worked on shrimp boats out of Tampa and sailed small boats to the Yucatan, where he lived with a Mexican family. Around 1960 he      found himself on Elliott Key where he was allowed to stay for keeping an eye on things.  The sole occupant of the island, he built a shack on the shoreline of driftwood on stilts that he called “Sea Stairs”. Almost immediately it was demolished by a hurricane. He rebuilt it and remained for seven years alone on the island. His artwork began there when the sailboat Mandalay sank in the bay. He rowed out and salvaged pieces of the sail. He drew on the sailcloth using fabric dye in toothpaste-like tubes with large ballpoints. When he ran out of sail canvas, he drew on any fabric he could acquire. One of his most beautiful pieces fills a bed sheet.

Owen's sparse storefront space in the Grove became the meeting place of other artists and friends. Painter Robert Newrock was a close friend, and the poet Robert Vaughn held court reciting his poetry. It was Coconut Grove's "Bateau Lavoir," where hours were passed in lively discussion influenced by drink and other mind-altering substances. But Owen didn't need and didn't indulge much in mind-altering substances.  His vision was unaided and constant. He pinned fabric to plywood boards with thumbtacks and worked with an energy so intense that his small hands knotted as he bore down on the surface of his work. He even painted the entire floor of his gallery a colorful mural of dueling sea monsters. Then he moved into a black-ink-on-paper period. For a show in October 1970, friends helped attach the drawings to clothesline zigzagged across the gallery. Later he created collages with materials found on trash piles, a phenomenon of Miami street life.

Through the huge plate-glass window of his Coconut Grove gallery Owen observed the passers-by and expressed his thoughts and feelings about them through his art. He had no driver's license, hated cars, and never drove. On one of his drawings depicting technology versus nature, he railed, "Your new cars are like the migraine headaches of a thousand roaches." Owen considered himself a poet; he said his visual art was a byproduct of the poetry in his mind. In the l970s a friend typed 183 pages - only part - of his epic poem called The Death of the Destroyer Commander, which Owen longed to publish. One or two copies remain with friends, but much of his writing has been lost.

Owen scored a studio space in San Francisco for a couple of years in the 1980s. On several works, he wrote Filbert Street, the location of his studio. He loved to tell about his rooming house where a group of Hell's Angels lived. They were the nice s t guys    he ever met, he said! They lent him money and fed him when times were hard. During these years he sometimes took other names he fancied, signing his pieces Morgan Owen or William Owen.

The free mooring of Boca Chika Bay off Key West was Owen’s last watery home, where he lived on his boat The Eileen through the 1990s. He constructed a platform on the roof of the boat where he painted. Already resembling Van Gogh in his temperament, he seemed to be risking the historic sunstroke! Here the available medium was house paint. He painted on canvas, paper, wood and cardboard and covered many works with fiberglass resin or varnish obtained by osmosis from the boat-repair activities around him. He touted the invincibility of the coated pieces, saying the y could be hung outdoors.

When the Eileen sank, Owen insisted that an unbalanced, disgruntled neighbor had done the deed due to a misunderstanding. The only offer of refuge came from a friend who was a Christian evangelical manager of a homeless shelter in West Palm Beach. Owen shunned the opportunity to live in a VA home, which in his mind would be populated by boring old men in polyester suits reminiscing about their conquests. In the end, he despised the proselytizing he had to endure when his preacher friend took him to the grocery store weekly. He lived in a small trailer beside a highway for the last couple of years of his life, without sight of the sea, still dreaming of phrases or images he might sell to make a living. Owen died during emergency heart surgery in 2002, shortly before his 80th birthday.

- Written by Lyle Lansdell & the late Bill Grier, Owen’s resolute patrons