‘I’m feeling it in the cells of my body’
Artist Jivan Lee embraces Expressionists’ vibrant palettes
Suffering from Lyme Disease during a crosscountry trip in the middle of Ohio, Jivan Lee dreamed of a place of illumination and light.
That place was New Mexico, where the Woodstock, N.Y., resident moved to in 2008.
“I got stuck in Albuquerque on the way to California and I never left,” he said.
Viewers can see the results of that change in the plein air (outdoor) landscape painter’s exhibit “Jivan Lee: Dynamics of Change” at Santa Fe’s lewallengalleries.com through Sept. 19.
Awash in bold colors and textures, his large (up to 4x4 feet) works capture the sweeping views and visceral emotions of a constantly changing landscape.
Now living in Taos, Lee switched from the logic and science side of his brain as he worked on a sustainability project at Taos Pueblo to the subjective, right brain work of creating art. He had majored in environmental policy at Bard College. But he also took studio art classes.
“I always thought I would just do it as a hobby,” he said.
When he landed in Albuquerque, Lee worked on a research project at the University of New Mexico that eventually took him to Taos.
Then another dream swept over him that told him to start painting.
In 2011, he launched a solo show at a Taos gallery. He sold one painting.
“That was a good reality check,” Lee said. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. I had no reciprocal income, so that was disappointing.”
Next, he took some of his work to a Santa Fe gallery, where he sold enough to pay
for his supplies. A second solo show in Taos was the turning point.
“I sold a lot,” he said. He landed at LewAllen Galleries in 2015.
Lee had seen other artists painting outside and he was intrigued by the process. The studio was a controlled environment.
His unusually large paintings emerge from direct observation, no matter the weather. The wind, rain and snow may swirl around him, but he keeps on painting, bundling himself in as many as five layers of clothing in the cold.
“My first attempts were frustrating and ended in tears,” he said.
He mastered the challenges with palette knives and wide spatulas to produce the thick impasto he desired. He sometimes encased himself in a cardboard box as protection from the wind.
“Literally, I had dirt embedded in the painting,” he said.
That direct observation became the centerpiece of his practice.
“It was about the experience of staying in a place as the light and the weather changes,” he said. “To me, it’s very compelling.”
“Lost and Then Found” (2020) emerged from disaster. Thunderheads roil across the 4x4-foot square oil on panel. Lee started the painting outdoors. Then the wind thrust it onto the tailgate of his pickup truck, slashing an 8-inch hole into the canvas.
“I was cursing like a sailor,” he said. He resurrected the painting by using the damaged original as a study.
His “Around the Corner” (2020) series captures an apple orchard and alfalfa field literally around the corner from his home at different times of day. The colors shift according to the seasons and the light.
When he first began painting landscapes, Lee’s color choices were more representational. In 2013, he began thinking about the Expressionists’ vibrant palettes.
“The results echoed spots in art history that I inadvertently stumbled into,” he said. “The paintings started to pop even more. It’s almost a visceral thing. The taste of purple would come across my throat; it’s like an inner seeing. It’s as if I’m feeling it in the cells of my body.”
Beyond the daily shifts of weather, atmosphere and light, his paintings become repositories of the Earth’s shifts occurring across thousands of years as a river carves a valley and mountains rise slowly into peaks. The sunlight performs more than illumination; it determines color as the tones shift throughout the day and across the seasons.
Lee traces his muscular texture to the time he first saw Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“It was the first time I got sucked into a painting that left me revered and inspired,” he said. “And (the Impressionist Claude) Monet has been on my mind for the last five years. He was so investigatory about light and ended in almost abstraction with the water lilies.”
“County Line” (2019-20) shows the Rio Grande winding through the Taos Gorge. Like Monet with his haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, Lee has painted this scene of angled geometry at least 10 times.
“The late winter on the Rio Grande is special because it is so colorful,” he said. “I love the red willow, and the changing greens of the juniper and piñon.”
Lee’s paintings have been exhibited at museums and educational institutions across the country.