“Painting, that difficult art, requires your whole attention, your whole life,” vowed Lee Hall, a maxim she expanded just a few years before her death to include this advice: “only do art if you can’t live without it.” Whether executing her signature large-scale abstracted landscapes, teaching college students, serving as an executive leader, or writing about both classical and contemporary aesthetic topics, Hall devoted her days to that purpose—art—and employed the full spectrum of her creative and intellectual talents in so doing.
Born in Lexington, North Carolina, Lee Hall’s childhood was largely spent in Florida, where she moved with her mother following her parents’ divorce. Summers, however, found her in the forests and fields that surrounded her maternal grandparents’ home in the verdant center of the Tarheel state. Her affinity for nature and a close relationship with her grandmother inspired Hall’s matriculation at the Woman’s College of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greens
