Lee Felipe is a Boston-based artist whose recent work centers on painting as a tool for memory, reflection, and emotional truth. He was introduced to Artists for Humanity through his brother, a long-standing mentor there, and credits AFH as an early space where he found footing and direction while growing up in the inner city. Although accepted into multiple private art schools in Massachusetts, he chose to study psychology, a decision that continues to inform how he observes people, relationships, and lived experience. He returned to painting in the summer of 2025 with a renewed focus, producing a new body of work rooted in personal history, identity, and emotional realism.

My earlier portrait work focused on people who delivered some of the most difficult lessons in my life, where painting became a way to transmute challenging energy into something meaningful and grounded. My early abstract work was more volatile and impulsive, reflecting my emotional state as a teenager, before gradually becoming more structured as I matured—moving toward contained forms, layered blocks, and controlled color that often merged into explosive compositions. I continued exploring abstraction through different materials and textures, including sand and mixed media, as a way of understanding movement and restraint. My current work shifts toward a grittier, urban visual language that externalizes my lived experience growing up in Dorchester, addressing heavy realities such as violence, loss, and abuse within the communities that shaped me.