He has held senior-level positions at progressive companies and government institutions, both domestically and internationally, building an extensive portfolio of business know-how over the years and driving profit-generating results. And that very personal, intimate experience, it’s unparalleled.George Stroumboulis is an entrepreneur to the core, having launched several ventures across multiple industries and international markets. You’re just constantly thinking about, Is this good? Am I doing it right? With photography and skateboarding, it’s just you creating the thing yourself, by yourself, on your own. “Acting just feels so different,” he says. Ultimately, though, photography is much less like acting than his first career, skateboarding. And so you just try to have fun with it.” I never considered myself to be a tremendous actor, by any means. “It sounds stupid, but I’m just proud to have just been able to do it in general…. “Relatively soon, I want to switch that part of my brain back on and get trucking,” he says. Nothing is set in stone, but a few projects could emerge, and he’d love to provide some closure to fans of My Name Is Earl, which ended on a cliff-hanger. Photography will be keeping Lee busy for the near future-he has three books of photography coming out over the next three years-but he is also thinking about getting back to acting. “They’ve said to me, ‘I lived there and I drove by that grain silo all the time while dreaming about getting out of that town.’” “I’ve literally had people buy prints because it was the town that they lived in,” he says. Though he was once chased out of a town by a local who, Lee surmises, thought his town car and medium-format camera looked suspicious, photography has given Lee inroads to meet the locals around his adopted home. In conversation, he cites Paris, Texas, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and David Byrne’s True Stories, his source for that “Texas color palette.” His photographs are also inspired by the films that he loves. The camera has basically just replaced the skateboard,” he says. It’s almost like he is still the skate kid looking for that perfect skate spot, which inevitably always seems to be somewhere abandoned, graffitied, forgotten. That vague, backcountry “Everytown America” feeling is a prevailing theme of Lee’s photography, which he has already collected in a book and featured on the Instagram film photography gallery Derelict, abandoned homes in open fields and dusty stretches of flat, long road are rendered in warm, temperate hues. “There is definitely some nostalgia for road-tripping, being out on the road, exploring parts of America that you’ve not seen before, the memories that come to mind from childhood, or even from cinema.” “I tend to be sort of nostalgic, very sentimental,” says Lee. When he’s not with his family, he’s usually on the road, using vintage cameras and lenses, and, at times, expired film to capture the “kind of landscape that exists all around America,” he says. Sometimes the kids are allowed to watch a little television. It’s all green and windy roads, and there’s horses and cows everywhere you look.” A typical day for the Lee family consists of cooking, riding bikes, and lots of outdoor time. “It’s like a small Austin…And where we live is in the country. Lee, his wife, Ceren, and their five kids- Pilot, Sonny, Casper, Alberta, and newborn Edith-live outside of Denton, Texas. Texas stuck with him, and four years ago, he moved his family from Los Angeles, looking for more space to raise their growing family. “I was just kind of aimlessly roaming California, and then I started exploring Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas,” he says. “We have iPhones and Sonics and Dairy Queens now,” he says, “but it’s essentially the same conflicted landscape that it was a hundred years ago.”Ī little over a decade ago, the actor known for his roles in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and Chasing Amy and his beloved sitcom My Name Is Earl started taking road trips around the West and bringing a few cameras along. On the way, the 49-year-old actor has “road time,” and though he usually listens to cassette tapes, today he’s on a Bluetooth earpiece, talking about his love for some of the most forgotten and overlooked places in America. His first solo photography exhibit opens on June 1, and he’s on the way to oversee its installation. On a day in mid-May, Jason Lee is in his 1994 Lincoln town car, headed north from his home in Texas to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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