(HACKENSACK, NJ) -- As a high school girl in Korea, Yongkyung (Scola) Lee wanted to write poems and paint pictures. She studied nursing instead, because nursing was how a young Korean woman could get to America.
She came. She worked in American hospitals, where she found a spirit of sharing and caring — in-ae, in Korean — that she says shaped everything after it. She married young, raised three children, and nursed for decades. The poems and the paintings waited.
In middle age she could not hold the longing back any longer and picked up a brush. Around the age of 70 she began painting watercolors in earnest. Her first solo exhibition, "Shoal of Time" (세월의 여울목), opens September 18 at Riverside Gallery in Hackensack and runs through September 26, 2026. It holds 102 paintings.
"I gave up poems and pictures to study nursing, because that was how I could come to America," Lee said.
Lee never trained formally as an artist, and she says that turned out to be a kind of freedom. With no prescribed method to follow, she mixes her own colors and paints what she sees with what she calls her nursing eye. She works outdoors across northern and central New Jersey and returns to the same places in different seasons: Mount Tammany in Warren County, Round Valley Reservoir in Hunterdon, the Hudson River, the Black River, Schooley's Mountain, Turkey Mountain and Pyramid Mountain in Morris County, Chimney Rock in Somerset, Cheesequake State Park in Middlesex, the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Sandy Hook Beach on the Monmouth shore.
"The sound of water, the sound of wind, the sound of flowers opening," she said, describing what she paints. "A changing sky, a leaf, water, an ordinary flower. There are extraordinary moments inside ordinary things, and I wanted to hold those."
The paintings carry half a century of life in New Jersey — its landscapes, and the memory and longing she has drawn up from them.
Asked how the eye that nursed differs from the eye that paints, Lee gave an answer she seemed to have arrived at only after both: "In the end, they were not different at all. They were the same."
"Shoal of Time" is also the title of her recently published art book, printed with double-page spreads so that a single landscape opens across two pages.
An opening reception will be held Saturday, September 19, from 3 to 5 p.m. The artist will be present. Admission is free.
Riverside Gallery is open Monday through Saturday (closed Sunday) from 11:00am to 7:00pm. The gallery is located at One Riverside Square, Suite 201, Hackensack, NJ 07601 (inside The Shops at Riverside). Admission is free.
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