Doris Lee began her art studies with Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute and continued at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts under Arnold Blanche whom she later married. Between 1927-29, Lee studied in Paris under the cubist painter Andre L'Hote. In the early 1930s, the artist moved permanently to Woodstock, New York where she became a leading figure in the thriving artist's colony.

Having worked during the 1930s and 40s in a social-realist style not unlike that of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Lee shifted her artistic perspective when she began frequenting the Florida Keys in the 50s and 60s. The large body of work produced during these trips reveals a new interest in color and abstraction as well as a natural shift in subject matter to sea and landscapes of the nearby coastal areas. Mainly inspired by the work of Henri Matisse and Milton Avery, Lee's Florida pictures also allude to artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. At times "Lee transforms Rothko-like abstractions into lighthearted landscapes, populated by Picassoesque bathers and Matissean palm trees. A sprinkling of Gottlieb's color doodles are strewn around for spice." (T. Styron, Doris Lee: The Florida Paintings, Greenville, South Carolina, 1991)