Muralist Donna Lee sits by the big Green Monster she created in her son Alex’s bedroom. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Woodside Road resident Donna Lee loves the Red Sox. She’s not just a casual fan or a fair-weather fan, she’s the real thing: a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Boston Red Sox fan who went to the games with her dad as a girl and took him to a game to sit in her company’s box seats when he couldn’t get there himself anymore. She’s been a true fan ever since she can remember. She got her love of the game and of the Red Sox from her dad, who grew up in the Egleston Square area of Dorchester. Lee’s dad went to the games with packs of boys from all over Boston. She says, “When I was a kid, I don’t think there was a home game we didn’t go to.”

Along with her passion for baseball and the Red Sox, she owes her artistic talent to her dad as well, she believes. He sketched and drew but never did anything with it. When she moved to Harvard, Lee started an interior design business. It is a one-woman show which she says specializes in color. Her eye for color comes naturally and is almost intuitive. So when she looked at the 14-foot wall in her son’s bedroom this fall, she saw the Green Monster as clear as day and set out to recreate it. She worked with a paint-shop owner in West Concord and together they recreated that indescribable and unique color green in a magnetic paint that serves the purpose. The wall so strikingly conjures the real thing that it’s hard not to smile while looking at it. With some family from New York, she laughed when she recounted the story of her brother-in-law, a Yankees fan, having to sleep in her son’s bedroom on a recent visit. “I think he may have had nightmares,” she joked.

Lee began drawing in grade school and continued through high school, where she won a few awards for some of her work. In sixth grade she painted a mural for the elementary school she attended. Murals and room dividers are a specialty now. The room dividers are more pieces of art, Lee claims. She does pen-and-ink and watercolor, too. She particularly enjoys painting skies and clouds and has done many for children’s bedrooms. Her website has much of her work, including a mural of Scooby Doo and Shabby that she did for a client in Sudbury.

Although painting is one of her specialties, the part of her business she enjoys most is picking a color palette for her clients and getting them on the right track with color.

“I do it for my own therapy,” Lee says about her work. “I love to paint and I love color. I see color as bringing serenity and joy into people’s lives. Many people are afraid of color. I find that color can be used to affect one’s mood. I really enjoy making a client’s home a place they come to and feel soothed and relaxed.”

After Lee’s dad died she found a sketch of Santa Claus he had done on a piece of lined, three-ring-notebook paper. She had it cleaned up and matted and has it framed in her living room. She also has a photograph of her dad in the Red Sox dugout, cane in hand at age 80, smiling like the cat that ate the canary. This visit was when Lee took him on a tour of Fenway Park, where he was “like a kid in a candy store.” According to Donna, her dad’s wish was to make it to the millennium and to see a World Series game. He passed away in December 2003 before the last World Series win by the Red Sox. Donna finds it ironic that his favorite bird is the cardinal and the Red Sox played the Cardinals in that series and won. I asked her what he would have said if he had been here for the game Sunday night. “Hip, hip, hooray,” she said.