Solo Exhibition | Scottsdale, AZ
Altamira Fine Art Scottsdale is pleased to present Weathervane, a solo exhibition for New Mexico artist Jivan Lee.
Please join us Thursday, January 16th during the Gold Palette ArtWalk, for an Artist Reception from 6:30-9pm. The artist will be in attendance.
To mark his birthday, Jivan Lee makes a painting. This year’s, “Thirty Five (Storm Over the Mountain),” found him feverishly working en plein air, racing to capture the ominous momentum of a storm swelling over Taos Mountain. As such, a “terrible awe” pervades the painting, a dramatic threshold filled with fierce beauty. “In person, on location, I was close enough to feel how powerful the storm was,” Lee says. “There was a sense of the atmosphere falling down onto the earth, a sense of density. The clouds were so ferocious.”
The scene represented a shift for the oil painter, away from exploring conceptual frontiers, toward a state of dwelling within this terrain. “I have pushed into a number of places that I need to inhabit for a while. I wanted to spend more time with the elements, being in the elements.” The resulting work pulses with physical presence, compositions that could only come about from lived experience. This arterial insight drew Lee to reconsider “weathervane” according to its homonym, “weather vein.” Thus titled, the series seems to take the pulse of the weather, bearing witness to singular conditions both mighty and subtle. Like opening his front door to the anomaly of freezing fog, a grainy skim surrounding his home. Or the serenity of seeing snow settle atop fall foliage, a rare glimpse of seasonal cusp.
“In this particular show, I am stepping away from conceptual effort to focus on moments where the link is being in weather while it develops and saturates and encompasses one in the landscape.”
As a whole, the show spins like a weathervane, pointing at different natural episodes, different faces of weather’s personality. As the compass moves, the axis remains resolute—a metaphor for Lee’s labor as an artist, his continual experimentation with visual elements: tonality, palette, composition, abstraction and resolution. Natural flux grounded in artistic exploration. “My painting practice serves as the center point as I go around and try and compile this series of unusual moments in weather.”
Pre-sales available.
Contact the gallery for more details, az@altamiraart.com, 480-949-1256.
Artist Biography
Jivan Lee is an oil painter based in Taos, NM. He grew up in Woodstock, NY and studied painting at Bard College. His work explores the nature of paint as raw material, creator of image, and catalyst for emotional response, and is increasingly addressing the complexities of how humans see and shape their environment.
His paintings are rhythmic, colorful, textural responses to the Western landscape in its many forms, from untrammeled wild lands to urban machinery to iconic chapels. They’ve been exhibited nationally at museums and educational institutions and covered in publications such as Fine Art Connoisseur, Southwest Art, Western Art Collector, Art Business News, and Plein Air Magazine among others. In addition to painting as much as time allows, Jivan occasionally teaches and continues work with his Project for Art and the Environment.
Jivan was named an artist to watch by Fine Art Connoisseur in February 2016 and his work was featured on the cover of Southwest Art Magazine’s February 2015 annual landscape issue. Phoenix Home and Garden Magazine published a six-page feature on his work and process, “A Respect for the Land,” in December 2016. Selected recent exhibitions include the 2017 and 2018 Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver, CO, where Jivan won the Fine Art Connoisseur award for excellence two years in a row, and New Regionalisms: Contemporary Art in the Western States, an exhibit curated by art critic Michael Paglia at the McNichols Building in Denver. Jivan’s paintings are in corporate and private collections nationally and internationally.
