At the Intersection, 2022 Oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches
JUNE 16 – JULY 15.2023
JUNE 16–JULY 15.2023
LewAllenGalleries
1613 Paseo de Peralt a I Santa Fe, New Mexico 875 01 I
I lewallengalleries.com I contact@lewallengalleries.com
Cover: Along the Rio Hondo (detail), 2022, oil on panel, 72" x 48"
Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com
Cover: Along the Rio Hondo (detail), 2022, oil on panel, 72 x 48 inches
LewAllenGalleries
1613 PaseodePeralt a I Santa Fe,New Mexico 87501 I 505.988.3250 I lewallengalleries.com I contact@lewallengalleries.com
Cover: Along the Rio Hondo (detail), 2022, oil on panel, 72" x 48"
A sense of place is paramount in Jivan Lee’s paintings of the landscape in and around Valdez, New Mexico. Stretching outward from the banks of the Rio Hondo, it’s this place with a population of less than 500 and wilds that encroach on half-hidden traces of human habitation; with distant houses, tended fields, glimpses of a curving road; with the drama of a winter storm or the peace of a quiet spring day that constitutes the backbone of Lee’s latest exhibition, Hondo, at LewAllen Galleries.
Changes in atmosphere and light and their affect on the terrain, even to the point of radically altering its appearance, are common enough sights in the high desert of Northern New Mexico. But an artist such as Lee, in presenting canvases that cover a certain region over time, reveals a bigger picture. The landscapes presented in Hondo capture the protean nature and ephemerality of this region of the Southwest and an incongruity: its inhospitable beauty. But through it all the bright sun over ochre desert grasses, rendered in a thick but energetic impasto; distant, snow-shrouded farms; a winter whiteout obliterating an entire mountain scene; and the golden glow of fall foliage is the road that led Lee to every vantage point in every composition, and the Rio Hondo, whose waters provide for the land and for the artist. These elements tie his latest works together. But to arrive at the deeper portrait of place, sketched by the river and road, a transition from a narrow to a broad focus, accompanied by ever-shifting changes in perspective, was necessary.
Lee is a plein air painter, who’s outfitted his pickup for day-long ventures, replete with a pull-out palette of oils, back up paints, and a roll-out canopy, staked down, to keep out the weather. And it’s the routes he drives daily in his art mobile, no doubt well-known to the residents of Valdez, in a ceaseless exchange of onsite and studio practice.
But if one aspect of his practice was in service to the other, it’s the opposite of what you might expect. Lee can finish a painting in the studio and engage in the process of editing, particularly when working in series. But the real work is in the field.
“I had a dream in 2015 telling me I needed to work more on the studio side of things,” says the 38-year-old painter. “So, I ended up doing that, trying to figure out, ‘Where’s the place in the process that I’m doing, where I’m out in nature and the whole point is that the circumstances that nature presents are introduced randomness that I can’t control?’”
Lee discovered that he doesn’t want to control it.
“I want to be surprised, so that there’s an innate, in-built requirement to stay present in this moment.”
If you can imagine it, that means venturing out in temperatures and weather conditions that would make most experienced plein air painters quail. Under the tarp, protected from rain, wind and snow, he works quickly, the cold hardening the soft oils as he strives to capture an immediate impression before a drastic change alters the scene (which might just prompt him to move to another canvas). The day brings what it brings, pleasant or unpleasant.
“If the process is situated in the landscape, and I have to be in the landscape presenting something new every time, that becomes a pretty amazing invitation for adaptations and unexpected solutions to things I’m not anticipating out there.”
His process, with its component of chance, was the subject of an intense focus on a single subject, Pueblo Peak, north of Taos, in 2021. Seventy-two canvases originally comprised the resulting series 10,000 Mountains , which now hangs in the artist’s Taos studio. It covered a view of the mountain daily from the same position over the course of a winter season. Lee’s since added more, covering a full year in the mountain’s life.
“I realized that a full cycle was the requirement, and in that case, I needed to get the whole season back, put in new days around the old days and play more with the idea of temporality,” he says. “It was a learning process. This project was about what would happen if I had these panels set up in sequential order, in linear fashion, painting from one thing to the next and trying to have it clear that, while one moment is one moment, there’s a corresponding spark across an hour or three hours or a day.”
By contrast, his new work, presented in Hondo, includes multiple views of just one region in Taos County, often painted from different areas. But the allure of a single spot and its visible shifts over time, still call to him. And this time, he responds with an installation, approximately 8-feet-square, of a dozen sunset paintings.
It’s a subtle, perhaps even imperceptible difference to the viewer. But for the artist, the sunset paintings represent a shift from a focus on the mountain as a landscape subject to a focus on perception. What did it was the winter whiteout painting of the mountain, in which the intended subject can’t be discerned despite its massive presence on the landscape.
“I thought I was telling a story of time about the mountain,” he says, recalling the lyrics to the Donovan song “There is a Mountain” (First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is) “Then, it was as if the sense of meaning of that mountain as a motif, symbol, or idea started to get really wobbly and break apart. I never once painted landscape at all. It’s all non-objective. There’s no meaning in paint. It only develops meaning in each of our personal brains.”
Overtly, most viewers would read Lee’s paintings as landscapes, as it is the landscape which inspires him. But his subject changed. Or, rather, its reality did as he gauged a new understanding of his role in relation to it. Now, he says, he paints associations and relatedness, and the landscape shifted from subject to medium.
“We grew up out of the protoplasmic puddle of single-celled organisms into the landscape. It’s so deeply a part of who we are that if I paint a sunset, there’s all this association about life and death, about the arc of living, the sunset of life, the beautiful technicolor moments, and the idea that nighttime is coming and the animals are going to come get us. Even if we’re deeply enmeshed in society, at some primal level that stuff, which is many millennia old, exists. We aren’t that separate from the landscape.”
With the sunset paintings, each composition is from the same location, but with the sun at different positions in the sky and slightly different angles of view. Like the geometric abstractions of German-born artist Josef Albers, color differentials alter the feeling as well as the appearance of the sunsets when placed side by side. Playing with fundamentals of colors lends these works a theoretical underpinning in color dynamics. The focus on a single moment, sunset, even if each one was painted on a different day, emphasizes contrasts we rarely notice from day to day.
A painter since his student days at New York’s Bard College, where he earned a degree in biology in the early 2000s, and a Master of Science in environmental policy in 2007, Lee worked primarily as a policy consultant rather than as an artist. In 2011, after instructing at the University of New Mexico, leading a program in art and ecology, and consulting on sustainability and tribal preservation projects at Taos Pueblo, he made painting a fulltime practice. “My process for the first five years of landscape painting was about following intuition and seeing where it leads,” he told Pasatiempo magazine in 2021. And he still follows his intuition, only in a more controlled way. It isn’t the kind of control he was rebelling against when he had his dream about the studio, but something akin to the way a poet, working within the confines of a traditional structure, finds room for creativity.
And there was a practical reason: the birth of his daughter, whose presence meant he could no longer head out half a day’s drive to remote locations. He needed to stick closer to home.
But Valdez, and the Rio Hondo (“hondo” being Spanish for “deep”), offer plenty continually renewing in the light of each new day, and from hour to hour, moment to moment. And these paintings represent no more than a few square miles of space along the Rio Hondo. And the river itself is the reason the village exists as a place of human habitation. Without the river, Lee says, “there’d be nothing here for me to paint, no road, no people living here.”
“The show title is referring to the river but also referring to looking deeply to the things that are close to us, whether it’s a sunset or a storm from the same spot,” he says. “The ten thousand manifestations of phenomenal reality open up in one location just by me relating regularly to it in the mundane of days.”
Atypical for Lee was the inclusion of a road jutting through the landscape, which he does with several works of vibrant autumn days, painting from the perspective of the road itself. At other times the road is in the distance, almost imperceptible among a haunted winter landscape’s freshly fallen snow or the atmospheric haze of distance.
“I was a little uncomfortable putting a road in a romantic landscape and letting the road tell a story,” he says, after years of striving to keep human elements decentered or left out of a composition altogether. “But you’ve got to let the road be the road.”
Until recently, Lee, who’s painted mechanical and human-made subjects in the past, focused on the wild manifestations of nature. Now, human elements are coming back in, but the wildness still holds, setting up an intriguing interplay between nature’s capriciousness and our stoic will to, if not tame it, survive in it and a slow appreciation for the symbiotic relationship between people and place seeps in.
For Lee, the resonance goes even deeper, to one of sameness. “There’s a sense of there being a philosophical resonance,” he says of the relationship between people and place, “and a sense of literal resonance, like I am breathing out carbon dioxide that feeds the trees and literally sweating out water that comes from the sky, like I’m an ambulatory landscape.”
— Michael Abatemarco
West from 150 at Noon (diptych), 2023
Oil on panel, 48 x 96 inches
Twelve Sunset #3, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Twelve Sunset #5, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Twelve Sunset #7, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Twelve Sunset #9, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Twelve Sunset #11, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Snow in the Mountains, Rain in the Valley, 2023
Oil on panel, 60 x 48 inches
Fields / Snow and Spring (diptych), 2023
Oil on panel, 12 x 28 inches
Storm in the Canyon (triptych), 2023
Building Storms #1, 2023
Oil on panel, 36 x 36 inches
Storm #1, 2022
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Storm #3, 2022
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Storm #5, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Storm #7, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Storm #9, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Storm #11, 2023
Oil on panel, 24 x 18 inches
BIOGRAPHY
Known for his vibrant sense of color and his textural application of paint, Jivan Lee has a growing reputation as a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting. His powerful work incites a visceral involvement with the landscape, which is mirrored by his highly physical approach to surface and an intense on-location painting process.
Lee’s art is a visual testament to his close engagement with the landscape and his attunement to the diverse interrelated forces operating within it. By design, Lee’s plein air practice requires him to paint the land as it changes before him the sunrise as it illuminates the earth in the morning, or an afternoon storm as it gathers strength before unloading or dissipating. His art stresses the powerful, interlocking forces at play in the natural world, suggesting that his paintings are but snapshots within a dynamic and ceaseless metamorphosis.
Jivan Lee grew up in Woodstock, NY, and studied painting and environmental policy at Bard College. His paintings have been exhibited at museums and educational institutions across the country, and featured in reviews and articles in publications such as Western Art & Architecture, Fine Art Connoisseur, Southwest Art, the Albuquerque Journal, The Denver Post, American Art Collector, and Plein Air Magazine.
Across the Fields in Early January, 2023 Oil on panel, 60 x 40 inches
