Lee was born in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights in 1949, and at the age of seven moved with his family to Dalton, Georgia. He attended a one-room country schoolhouse containing all eight grades. For several consecutive years he was asked to create a large Christmas mural with colored chalk on the school blackboard. A local interior designer and architect named Marjorie Rhodes and her husband Travis, a textile designer, encouraged Lee in his drawing and painting. They themselves built an arts center out of a firehouse.

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 where it still hangs today in the girl's dormitory.

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 artist-in-residence. The summer of 1970 was spent travelling in Europe where he saw many of the art works he had studied in art history classes. He then enrolled in the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. There he studied life drawing, sculpture and painting for a full year, taking up an abstract style of painting as well as figurative painting. A family portrait was created in acrylics from a small Polaroid enlarged to a large canvas 48" by 60" (seen at right).