Jivan Lee: Watershed

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Known for his vibrant sense of color and 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 plein air painting process. Lee’s new exhibition, entitled Watershed, features recent paintings that highlight a circular dialogue of natural forces that serve to shape the New Mexican landscape around him: Taos Mountain and the Rio Grande Gorge. On view will be new works at both small and monumental scales, as well as a kaleidoscopic new series of paintings that amounts to a massive statement by Lee.
Lee’s art is a visual testament to his close engagement with the land 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. Watershed stresses the powerful, interlocking forces at play in the landscape, suggesting that his paintings are but snapshots within a dynamic and ceaseless metamorphosis. “Water is the tool by which nature shaped the Rio Grande Gorge, and it is the distributor of chance and possibility for plants and animals,” Lee writes in a statement for the show. “Without the action of mountains, rising into the sky, squeezing water from thin air, little would grow; green valleys would not be; rivers would not form.”
Included in this exhibition is a new series that recounts an epic, iterative story of time and our understanding of the natural world. In creating his 10,000 Mountains series, Lee returned to the same location to paint the same view of Taos Mountain, producing 72 small canvases at different times of day and in all manners of weather. Drawing on his background in biology and environmental science, the series gave Lee the opportunity to carefully, almost empirically investigate time, change, and human perception, using constants-depicting the same view in each painting-alongside the momentary variables of time, weather, and atmosphere. Other series in this exhibition-titled River Bends and Quartzite-involve a similar process and objective, but at a larger scale (and comprising fewer paintings).