Jivan Lee: Leave It At The Door

JIVAN LEE

Leave It At The Door

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Jivan Lee Leave It At The Door

June 29 - July 29.2018 Artist Reception Friday, June 29

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com

cover: Downstream Sunrise, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 30 in

Jivan Lee Leave It At The Door In sumptuous, impasto color, Jivan Lee’s paintings are marked with a feeling of visual celebration, raw atmosphere, and rhapsodic experience. Painted primarily on location among the great mountains, rivers and sunsets of New Mexico, Jivan Lee’s art is a visual testament to his close engagement with the land, as well as his visceral exploration into the raw material of paint itself. His art emanates an eager sense of appreciation and reverence for the land, beyond even its staggering beauty.

It is this sense of appreciation, combined with profound skill and a deeply gifted eye for color and atmosphere, which have contributed to his growing reputation as one of the most revelatory contemporary artists working en plein air.

His paintings are feasts for the senses—they lead our eyes on extraordinary, gratifying journeys through passages of incandescent-violet chamisa and piñon, over quietly flowing rivers of shimmering turquoise, and through expanses of sun-bleached hills that recede into dreamy horizons bereft of detail. Most unusually, Lee is able to transcribe the power and magic of his vistas not as though we were present with him in his creative enterprise, but as if they were our experiences.

One effect of a Jivan Lee painting is the impression of being made privy to a perfect moment in a secret spot all our own. Away from the commotion of every-day life, Lee’s art can encapsulate the exact, perfect instant that the sun turns everything either to yellow or violet, as in “Toward Sunset,” or just as the clouds begin to burst, as in “Late Winter Storm.” Also impressive is “Down the River,” in which Lee is able to capture the sun as it rises, its rays reaching around the earth and illuminating the land, the river and mountain. Just as the early American painters saw the rural western landscape as a stand-in for a lost Eden Jivan Lee’s painting reminds us of the elemental power of the land around us even beyond its visual beauty: a powerful feeling of peace, or even longing.

Above all else, Lee’s art resonates with an enchantment with not just New Mexico but also in the simple experience of the land and the sense-overtaking wonder at beauty itself. While he chooses as his subject matter such impossibly beautiful vistas, he is just as much interested in their felt experience; the ineffable spirit of each recorded moment. Perhaps it is this ability that lends his work its vitality and quiet, humming power that enfolds us in wonder as we look, too.

As the rich, painterly surfaces of his art suggest, Lee’s mode of painting enlists his whole body in its creative enterprise. His mark-making tools include the typical broad brush, but also spatulas and even his own bare hands. Up close, they celebrate paint for paint’s sake—luscious, colorful, and moldable—and assume the felt sensations of soil, rock, river, and sky. When viewed at a distance, they collect into dazzling, tour-de-force evocations of bristled earth, cold water and dazzling, backlit clouds.

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In his visceral exaltation of the land, he makes palpable the immaterial experience of his beautiful surroundings and of his own physical relationship with his materials. “I experience a quality of gratitude and awe that only happens when I’m out in the elements,” Lee says. “It is a key ingredient that animates me and my work, and helps me step beyond my more habituated tracks of seeing, thinking, and acting.” This instinctual spirit may come from the openness with which Lee experiences the land, and with which he is conscious of bracing himself against any preconceptions about what he observes as he paints.

So, too, does the thickness of his surface remind us that there are more important aspects to his painting the land than its exact literal replication. Perhaps it is only with this attitude in mind that we may feel what Lee experiences out on the gorge: a sense of something indefinable, internal, even non-objective. For these reasons, Lee is eager to dismantle those pristinely-detailed images of landscapes we are accustomed to in favor of mountains, rivers, gorges and mesas that ascend through miraculous, painterly color to a liminal place above specificity. Indeed, the more one takes in a Jivan Lee painting, the more it deepens into a collection of individual, abstracted moments: a truer, more expressive vision of the landscape, one where our preconceptions cannot blind us.

In this way, Lee is able to capture the powerful feeling of those perfect, sensory moments—looking out over a mesa as the sun begins its descent, a first deep breath of mountain air, or of a quiet moment near a river as it crawls beside you—but in a manner that dismantles our logic so that it can relate its own truth. Jivan Lee is quick to cite the simple joy felt when bearing witness to beautiful, spectacular places, and also the delicate moments of quietude within. But just as important to Lee is to question, as he asks, “How do we assemble these scenes into images that come with associated stories, nostalgia, longing, intrigue, and more?”

As the title of this LewAllen exhibition suggests, Lee is purposeful in his quest to dissolve his preconceptions about beauty, and in turn his viewers’. While his landscapes hold within them incredible beauty, they are presented so as to be reflective of the true experience of landscape.

Lee’s rapturous paintings react so directly to his scenes in their entirety that they engender emotional response, through bright, vivid colors and raw, broad brushstrokes. Just as the title to one of his most joyful paintings in this show, “Deference to the Unexpected,” alludes, we must hold our preconceptions of landscape loosely so as to not blind ourselves to what is before us. So does Lee hold loosely the detail of the changing land before him, in deference to the fleeting, intangible truths of his visceral experience and imaginative, untethered feeling.

The classic Dutch, Flemish and British masters of landscape painting saw the expressive, metaphoric potential of the rural landscape—rather than as mere backdrop, as had been the attitude before.

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Most relevant to contemporary art is their treatment of the sky, which they rendered in otherworldly, abstracted expressions of feeling, dissolving both shape and line. They still held a dutiful affinity for obedient realism when painting the land itself, but the sky they rendered eternally in flux, at an interminable distance, awe-inspiring in its inconceivable power and unimaginable beauty.

Lee’s mode is not to delineate his scenes based on such rules. For him, each chamisa, piñon tree, shadow-covered rock or glint of sun on the river presents an opportunity for discovery, exploration, and celebration. Ascribing the same expressive sensibility to the entire canvas, the experience of his work—and of the land he makes manifest in paint—is both intensely physical and intangible, each moment painted irreconcilably tied to each moment witnessed, a sense of something simultaneously mystical and innate. “Call it intuition, or mystery, or spirituality, or God, or the Tao, or the spirits of a place, or nothing at all other than nature being nature,” Lee says. “Whatever it is, I feel some part of it in my gut, and choose to relate to it through painting…. I can stumble onto its rhythm and I find that it has an art unto itself… I get to follow along as best as I am able through an opening into something ineffable yet immensely powerful.”

We know to look with wonder at the sky as the sun sets or rises, to behold with reverence its everchanging, color-filled beauty. But Jivan Lee teaches us also to notice how the earth changes around us, and to wonder how it changes us as we look. When speaking about this sense of unfolding his preconceptions while painting, Lee is reminded of a quote by the poet Rumi: “Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field; I’ll meet you there.”

Ultimately, Lee’s art urges us to leave what we carry with us, even for just a moment. The saying, “leave it at the door” became a mantra of sorts during his time creating these works, as he left his studio to find his next vista to paint, an effort to leave the weight behind that he carried before, and will carry again after his return. He writes, “I hope my work will inspire and provoke people to lose themselves a bit in landscape, joy, color and pure aesthetic experience – and to leave everything else at the door for a little while.”

Alex Gill

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Fences #2 - Glowing Light, 2018, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 in

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Down to the River, 2018, oil on two aluminum, 60 x 96 in

Homeward #1 - Late Winter Storm, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 36 in

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Homeward #2 - Spring Thunderstorms, 2018, oil on aluminum, 48 x 48 in

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Homeward #3 - Fertile Crescent, 2018, oil on aluminum, 48 x 84 in

River Bends - Colores de la Madrugada, 2018, oil on panel, 66 x 30 in

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Taos #7 - Rising Up at Noon Time, 2018, oil on aluminum, 68 x 48 in

Rising Light (Talpa Chapel #2), 2018, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in

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In the Shadow of Sunrise (Talpa Chapel #1), 2018, oil on panel, 40 x 30 in

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Morning Outside the Front Door, 2018, oil on panel (triptych), 24 x 96 in

Taos #2 - Cold Storm Ending, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in

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Taos #3 - Settling Into Night, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 30 in

Taos #5 - Fresh Snow, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 30 in

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Taos #6 - Disappearance, 2018, oil on panel, 24 x 30 in

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Taos #4 - Towards Sunset, 2018, oil on linen, 40 x 60 in

Fences #3 - Winter Palette, 2018, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in

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Field to Dusk Blue, 2018, oil on panel, 24 x 12 in

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Uncle Nepe's Old Bar, 2018, oil on canvas, 44 x 72 in

River Bends - Early Light, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 24 in

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Deference to the Unexpected, 2018, oil on aluminum, 52 x 48 in

Behind the Old Fruit Stand, 2018, oil on panel, 36 x 36 in

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Ending Light, 2018, oil on panel, 16 x 20 in

Picuris Peak - Early Light, 2018, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in

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Picuris Peak - Daybreak, 2018, oil on panel, 24 x 30 in

Picuris Peak - Storm Light, 2018, oil on panel, 16 x 20 in

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Storm Study, 2018, oil on panel, 6 x 6 in

Slowly Into Spring, 2018, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in

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Greys and Blues and Greens, 2018, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in

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Old Fruit Stand, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 60 in

Stillness and Motion, 2018, oil on aluminum, 48 x 60 in

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Fences #1, 2018, oil on panel, 24 x 18 in

Jivan Lee SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2011

11th Annual Invitational, Galerie Kornye West,

2018

Leave it at the Door, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

Fort Worth, TX

By the Wayside, Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ

The NOW WOW Project, Hudson Gallery, Sylvania, OH

2017

Our Land, Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ

2010

Portraits of the Sacred, Stables Gallery, Taos, NM

A River Runs Through, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

2008

Solutions, Trillion Space, Albuquerque, NM

2016

New Mexico, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe,

NM For the Wild, Heinley Fine Arts, Taos, NM

Atmosphere, Altamira Fine Art, Jackson, WY

2015

Hallowed Ground, Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, NM

2014

Sky Above / Earth Below, Heinley Fine Arts, Taos, NM

2013

Paint this Land, Heinley Fine Arts, Taos, NM

Introducing Jivan Lee, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO

2011

Recent Paintings by Jivan Lee, Milagro Gallery, Taos, NM

SELECTED AWARDS & HONORS

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018

Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, Denver, CO

New Regionalisms: Contemporary Art in the Western

States, McNichols Building, Denver, CO

2018

Fine Art Connoisseur Award, Coors Western Art Exhibit

and Sale

2017

Fine Art Connoisseur Award, Coors Western Art Exhibit

and Sale

2016

“Three to Watch” Artist, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine

Finalist, Large Purchase Initiative, New Mexico Art in

Public Places Program

2015

Cover Image, Southwest Art Magazine

Winner, 1st 2015 Showcase, ArtSlant

2014

Solo Exhibition Award, 2015 Solo Series, Harwood Art

Center, Albuquerque, NM

Winner, 3rd, 4th, & 5th 2014 Showcases, ArtSlant

2013

Invited Panelist, SURFACE Exhibition, Harwood Art

Center, Albuquerque, NM

Best of Show, 15th Annual Masterworks of New Mexico

Exhibition, Albuquerque, NM National Finalist, 2013 Ray

Mar Art Contest

Winner, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd 2013 showcases, ArtSlant

2017

Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, Denver, CO

Survey, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO

Jivan Lee and James Pringle Cook, Heinley Fine Arts, Taos,

NM

2016

Coors Western Art Exhibit and Sale, Denver, CO

OutWest Art Show, Great Falls, MT

2015

Great American Landscape, Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT

Rhythms in Nature, Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ

Deep Forest/High Desert, Heinley Fine Arts, Taos, NM

Wandering the West, Altamira Fine Art, Jackson, WY

2014

Earth, Water, & Sky, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO

Desert Mythos, Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ

2013

Jivan Lee and Peter Campell, Meyer East Gallery, Santa Fe,

NM

Under the Hill, Blumenschein Museum, Taos, NM

EDUCATION 2007 M.S. in Environmental Policy, Bard Center for Environ-

2012

Metro-State University of Denver, Center for Visual Art,

mental Policy (Five-year dual-degree program)

Taos Contemporary, Denver, CO

2007

B.A. Bard College (Five-year dual-degree program)

COLLECTIONS PNC Bank, Kansas City, MO 1stBank, Lakewood, CO HB Construction, Albuquerque, NM

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Private collections nationally and internationally

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2018 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Jivan Lee