Lee was born in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles in 1949, and then at the age of seven moved with his family to Dalton, Georgia. His first experiences making art occurred when his third grade teacher taught him how to use watercolor. At the age of 10, he started painting in oils at home. For several consecutive years he was asked to create a large Christmas mural with colored chalk on the blackboard, using Christmas cards for holiday images. A local interior designer and architect named Marjorie Rhodes and her husband Travis, a textile designer, encouraged Lee in his drawing and painting.

At age 12 he took an adult education oil painting class at the local community center. In class he painted several still lifes and a nocturnal painting of Innsbruck, Austria from a magazine photo (see at right).

While in high school at Mt. Vernon Academy in Ohio, he explored various painting techniques including mixing beeswax with paint. He painted a Japanese style mural on a silk-covered, double-paneled, hinged door which he sold in a local art gallery. Also, his first large-scale painting, a 48"x 36" floral still life in oil he gave to the school and it was hung in the cafeteria banquet room (see at right).

While a student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Lee majored in fine art and took many classes in art history, design, life drawing and painting. He was assigned as assistant to the British photorealist painter Malcolm Morley who was there as an artist in residence. After the summer of 1970 spent touring Europe where he saw many of the art works he had studied in art history classes, he enrolled in the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. At the DAI, he studied life drawing, sculpture and painting for a full year, taking up an abstract style of painting as well as making figurative paintings. A family portrait was created in acrylics from a small Polaroid blown up to a large canvas.