Up close Jivan Lee's paintings celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable. When viewed at a distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, and landscape – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image. Lee’s oil paintings explore the raw material of paint to create images and engender emotional response. He has become a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting, known for his lively sense of color, his textural application of paint, and his reflective, cerebral approach to engaging with his subject. His art engages his viewers in a visceral involvement with the landscape, which he achieves through a highly physical plein-air painting process. Lee is inspired by the landscape and artists of the Southwest. Whether conveying the shifting hues of backlit clouds, or a New Mexico river valley set ablaze in sunlight, Lee communicates a visceral, momentary feeling of being in a place and surrounded by natural beauty. He does this in part by emphasizing the sheer physical nature of his work. Rather than blending brushstrokes together, Lee allows his gestural marks to remain as sculptural as possible, highlighting them as unexpected, spontaneous sources of pattern or rhythm. The surface of a Jivan Lee painting thus becomes a mosaic of color cells or an energetic terrain all its own, brimming with fluid activity reminiscent at times of action painting. By design, Lee’s plein air practice is a body of work that requires him to paint the land as it changes before him—the sunrise as it begins to illuminate the earth in the morning, or perhaps an afternoon storm as it gathers strength and then unloads or dissipates. Even beyond the daily shifts of light, weather, or atmosphere, Lee’s paintings remind of the way the land exists as an accumulation of momentary shifts that take place over thousands of years: the way a river carves a valley, or perhaps the slow, majestic formation of mountains. As the hours, days, and even seasons change, Lee’s art also stresses the way that time and the various forces of nature and humanity relate and affect each other. The overall feeling of activity and motion within his work suggests that his canvases are but snapshots of a dynamic, ceaseless metamorphosis. Lee conceives of his work as being ultimately “an outdoor painting practice that explores time, change, and the complexities of how humans see and shape the environment.” Lee works on-site from direct observation and responds to the physicality of the natural environment. With paint applied using spatulas, brushes, paper towels, and even his bare hands, Lee’s art is distinguished by thick brush strokes and a tactile, sculptural quality with a dramatic use of color. The resulting pieces move between abstract fields of color, topographical planes, and recognizable imagery. Up close they celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable. When viewed at distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, and landscape – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image. Lee is originally from Woodstock, NY, and studied painting and environmental policy at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. Following graduate school, he taught for the University of New Mexico in Taos, and founded and directed the Project for Art and the Environment. His paintings have been exhibited nationally at museums and educational institutions and covered in numerous publications such as Western Art & Architecture, Southwest Contemporary, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Phoenix Home and Garden, Fine Art Connoisseur, Southwest Art, Art Business News, and Plein Air Magazine.