Jivan Lee revels in the viscous qualities of oil paint. In his 12-by-12-inch painting Process #1 - Lightning Squall,the paint itself is as important as the way he uses it to suggest a storm passing over a Northern New Mexico landscape.
Storms Down #2, oil on panel, 48 x 48 in.
“I think of oil paint as a colorful fossil,” he explains. “It’s an amazing technology. I paint with a lot of paint because it offers the opportunity to make a physical impression. It can receive and retain emotional gestural information and allows a physical topographical dimension unlike the flatness of a photograph. I slather a huge chunk of paint in an out-of-control flow state that becomes an accretion on the surface of the painting. A lot of paint allows a deeper mark. In Lightning Squall, the storm moved through with veils of rain. It was super hard to paint transparency with all that paint…Surface texture can add or it can subtract. The fact that paint lives on in a finished work as a dimensional component allows me to convey more information to people.”
Expansive, oil on panel, 48 x 90 in.
Lee’s most recent paintings will be shown in the exhibition Upwelling at Altamira Fine Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from October 13 through 27.
The period in which he prepared the work for the exhibition was an unusually stormy one in Northern New Mexico. Painting in plein air, he refers to his body “as an instrument through which I get the sensation of a place. What I find most engaging is that I’m steeped in the sensation of the space.” He feels the wind on his body and senses the change in temperature as a storm approaches. “If there’s a storm in the distance, I smell it,” he adds.
Referring to the show's title, Lee describes upwelling as “an oceanic phenomenon...I had been struggling with the subverbal sense that this work has had, and ‘upwelling’ felt apropos of a sensation that’s been strong lately. Speaking metaphorically and thinking of the body and our human experience and an ecology of its own that reflects the external landscape: upwelling, then, speaks to a rising up—from deep down in the oceanic, subconscious realm—that is connected to the greater ecological flows, wind and currents and more, above and below the surface of the sea of being.”
Process #1 – Lightning Squall, oil on panel, 12 x 12 in.
When painting, Lee frequently works from the bed of his truck. “The first thing I do is to take a moment to walk around the site for a while to see it,” he says. “From there I notice sensations across my body—the temperature on my skin, the ground crunching under my feet. The felt sensations bring me into the place. It’s the raw material of the eventual art piece, critical material I can’t skip over. Weather changes so quickly I need to make room for change.” Back in his Taos studio, there is time to make changes to the painting to bring it closer to his encounter with the scene.
Jivan Lee’s mobile plein air studio.
Through direct observation—experiencing the landscape in real time—he produces an image that causes in the viewer a visceral response similar to his lived experience.
Altamira Fine Art 172 Center Street, Suite 100 • Jackson, WY 83001 • (307) 739-4700 • www.altamiraart.com
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