Jivan Lee

My paintings arise out of an intensive place-based process in which I repeatedly engage specific locations over months, seasons, and years. I immerse myself in the landscape in pursuit of artwork animated by forces beyond my control. My all-season outdoor studio – which unrolls out of the back of my 4x4 pickup truck’s bed – shelters me just enough to paint in extremes of weather and season, but by design leaves me uncomfortably subject to their whims. I sweat in the hot sun, fumble around with frozen fingers in winter, and struggle through Monsoon winds and rain. In this way, the act of painting is centered in a bodily felt experience of each place, and Nature’s happenstance can shape each painting’s development and larger narrative arcs throughout series.

I use big flexible spatulas to add and subtract thick layers of impasto, recording the story of decisions made and remade in response to each evolving day. Paintings frequently grow as large as 6 or 12 feet on a side and extend across multiple panels, building with flows of attention and the dynamics of weather. Each day on location contributes to larger arcs of work that borrow from my previous career in science and almost empirically investigate time, change, and human perception. Across groups of related paintings, I systematically hold some things constant – such as season, time of day, motif, composition, format, or location – while varying others. This type of iterative engagement with the landscape helps me move attention beyond a singularly remarkable subject such as, for example, Taos Mountain, and into questions about how such subjects change through time, how our understanding of them is shaped by our evolving ways of seeing, and what such dynamics might say about the complexity of the natural world and our relationship to it.