Jivan Lee, Pt 1 - Large-scale Plein Air, Environmental Impact, Conceptual "Western" Art

Hello out there. You're listening to Horizons, a series of talks with the people who make, collect, and present artworks representing the American West. I'm George Irwin. Before we get started today, I'd like to ask you for a favor. If you could, please leave a review for the show on iTunes. It makes a big difference in getting the word out about the show. Also, if you can think of anyone who might like the show and you and you can send them a link, that would be great too. Thanks so much. Today's guest is Jeevan Lee, and I would like to just say thank you to Jeevan for your patience in me getting this published. Jeevan and I had a long and wide-ranging conversation in his studio in Taos, where we looked at some of his newer multi-canvas plein air pieces, and another one he had been working on previously, which was a large red and yellow tree, that had canvases not necessarily adjacent to each other, but all part of the same piece. And you'll, you'll hear us reference those in our conversation, which is why I'm describing them. Photos are in the show notes on western.gallery. If you haven't seen his work, check it out at jivanlee.com. That's J-I-V-A-N-L-E-E dot com, or on Instagram at jivanlee_art. He's a very talented plein air painter. He goes big with size and with volume of paint, and it makes a big impact when you view his work. Also, before we get started, most of you guys that are listening to this, I believe, are artists, so I wanted to draw your attention to Western Gallery's first online-only show, um, first show ever actually, called New Western Talent, featuring new, emerging, and mid-career artists with a focus on the American West. It's an open call. We've had plenty of great submissions already. It's gonna be a fantastic show. The deadline to apply is April 8th. That is Wednesday, April 8th. Coming up quickly, but if you've got 3 paintings that are ready to go, get your application in, be part of the show. Um, we've got 3 great judges. Brandon Brown, who you've heard previously on the podcast. He's a floor rep at Lou Allen Galleries in Santa Fe. Um, Rose Edmiston is a well-known Western art enthusiast and collector and rancher who lives in Arkansas. And Bill Nay is a collector of contemporary Western artists and follows their work closely and has a good grasp of what's happening right now. So great judges. Or jury, however you like to say it. Please send your work in. We want to make this as good as, uh, as good as it can be, and the only way that can happen is with your participation. So that you can find on the Western Gallery website at western.gallery, and there's a link for call for entries up there. The show itself will be online beginning May 8th, which is a Friday, and hopefully by then folks will be ready for some more art in their lives or even more distractions depending on if everyone's still locked in their houses or are out and about in the world. Alright, so with that, thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you for the reviews and your notes. It's really motivating and helpful. Please keep those coming. You can always send me things at info@western.gallery or DM me on Instagram at Western Gallery, or if you go to the website, I have a little Facebook pop-up thing, Messenger. I answer that as well. So hope to hear from you. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Enter the art show. Check out the art show when it comes out. All the things. Javon Lee, here you go. You guys have a farm? I didn't— I I did not realize that.

Farm is probably a little bit generous. I would never say that to an actual farmer.

Um, a big garden?

A large garden. Well, we sort of wild state our property.

Um, cool.

Flora used to be a farmer.

Oh, okay.

She's a, you know, doctor of oriental medicine now, and she has a whole business of like topical Chinese medicine things that she makes using stuff that we harvest at the property.

Awesome.

So a lot of that stuff grows wild, and therefore we just try to help it be happy in the wild. Farmstead, I suppose, is probably more accurate. We have chickens and ducks and stuff like that.

Cool.

Yeah.

I had ducks when I was a kid. Yeah.

Yeah, they're wild, man. They're such cacophonous, interesting personality critters. Man, raising them from babies, they're so stinky.

Gosh. Yes, there was always— Plenty of duck fertilizer everywhere.

Yeah.

All right.

So this is a 4-panel painting I'm putting together that is one in a whole set of these, you know, we were talking about these multi-panel pieces that have broken picture planes and all sorts of unusual artifacts of being on location. I wanted to kind of give the space to develop on their own rather than being like, well, I better sort of shoehorn this whole experience into one squarish or rectangle-ish kind of canvas. I started thinking, well, how about if I sort of inverted the idea of composition being what dictates the structure of a painting and allowed the experience of the place to dictate the shape of the final piece, literally? And where my attention was most drawn over the course of the day to be kind of what drives the compositional direction of the piece. And so—

can I?

Yeah.

I mean, maybe you're about to explain this, but so do you then add panels as you are going to explore what you're interested in?

Yeah.

As it's happening?

I mean, it depends on the day. The original idea was just kind of this notion of what we're saying, just letting things develop. Because on location, a lot of times it grew out of just necessity that originally when I first started painting, I had this beater 1989 Toyota sedan with a trunk and a back seat and nothing else. And so I had no room to do giant work on location, I thought, until I was like, well, why don't I want to do to do this really, really wide 10-foot piece in a spot that I was really excited about, and I thought, well, I could split it up, I guess. It was like that was a new idea in my head to do a landscape plein air piece at the time, because I wasn't, my interest wasn't as abstract as turning these days, which breaking up panels is obviously is done all over the place in installation work.

Right, yeah.

But sort of for me and my own personal process, that was a new development in whatever was kind of driving the show of my interest. That was, I don't know, probably 7 years ago, I guess. And so I split up this 10-foot piece into 3 40-inch long panels and then painted it on location on the side of my car. And the wind blew over, came up and blew the entire thing down face down. I was crying on location because it was such a— that was the first really big painting I did, and I did not have a big budget for paint, so that was a Extremely expensive.

This, this one was, or a different one?

This is 10-foot one that was the first idea of splitting things up. Gotcha. And then eventually I fit— I got, I got fed up honestly with the day because it was so rough out there. I had to go back to my studio and I finished it. I didn't have any room at my— at our house because I didn't have a studio at the time, and I finished it in a closet that was like 3 by 5, or from that probably 5 by 7, I guess, with some weird shelves that made it very small.. And so I had the panels sort of separate and would be messing in this little closet space because it smelled so bad. And it was at home. And usually my stuff was just outside. Anyway, necessity, man, mother of invention. And when I saw the piece done, I was like, wow. Well, I'm really happy I got this giant piece. But it's really cool to see this scene that I normally would have thought of as only one thing separated into three moments of artwork. Even though it's one united image across the panels, I left the spaces between the panels because I didn't want to pretend like they weren't there and have it just be this weak point that didn't actually just own that there was something separating the panels. And it ended up feeling like a film strip. It brought me back into the surface of the painting. And it was just a sort of jumping off point for thinking differently about why I was painting at all. Really, and what was happening with the image and the material of the paint itself and this constructed world that I was falling into in terms of this big view in New Mexico. Anyway, that's where this first idea came from with the multi-panel things. And this one on location, and it was— now I know that was kind of the seed of this idea of, well, I can change the shape of the panels. So in any day later on, I would still do these more rectangular general forms. But if I had wanted to do, say, Pedernal outside of Santa Fe, where O'Keeffe painted a bajillion times, which is this incredible mountain, and you can go and basically be right underneath it. And I was out painting another 10-foot piece. I found out later where Maynard Dixon had painted a painting looking the opposite direction. I had no idea. Yeah, I saw a painting posted online. I was like, wait a second, I was just there.

Yeah, that's a fun feeling. Oh, it's so fun.

Yeah, anything, you know, Mexico, I mean, a number of these places with a strong art history, you end up just constantly bumping into the coolest stories or, you know, happenstance, and you find out later, wow, you know, you were in the spot where some idol of yours was painting and looking at the world different, you know. Anyway, so I was painting this large piece and I had done a 48x70 sketch, which is pretty big, and then I was like, whoa, Oh, but actually, it's the entire sweep of this mountain shoulder that I want and the peak and everything. And so I added a, whatever, another 48, 50, I don't know, something like that. And continue drawing the whole composition. And that kind of idea of letting it grow as it goes is the foundation of this more developed notion where instead of it having to be continuous pictures, where even the panels kind of at least are framed together and look like one image, I started letting, like with this tree behind you that's 100 inches square, have space even more on the wall, letting the picture plane be broken and have a foot or 2 feet between different sections of the painting such that it almost looks like a Tetris painting.

Yeah, that I think is a great example of the concept you're describing about letting the composition kind of like— or letting the focal points drive the composition, right? You know, and which I think happens in, you know, single canvas paintings a lot. Sure, sure. People will focus in with contrast and detail on what they want you to do and, you know, pay less attention to background or other elements. But here there's actually nothing right in between, right?

Yeah. Which I— yes, so, you know, it's like this idea of letting it grow out of my intention. And then I realized how I look at landscape and it seems like from talking with people over the years, it's kind of common is you go out on a— you see a giant tree and you love the moss at the foot of the tree where the trunk is going into the ground. Or you love the branches and their contrast of the blue sky. And in the case of this big cottonwood, in fall in New Mexico, it turns so brilliant yellow. And yet there are these still hints of the green that once was in the summer and the ochres that enter in and then the oranges behind everything because of all the brush and everything else. And then still you get this almost acid green lawn because it's warm enough the grass is still happy, and usually it's wet enough in that season that the grass will be growing. You know, all these color contrasts for me were so exciting. And so in this big Cottonwood piece, I ended up skipping around and then landing in certain spots and, and almost paying no attention to other places. And when I saw that was happening, I thought, well, why don't I just let that be what it looks like? Which was again, you know, a natural progression that I didn't know I was coming to. And I, at the moment I arrived there, felt pretty uncomfortable but, um, but exciting. And so, you know, it took me about 4 months to actually figure out the painting and the composition, because when I was on location I had clamped stuff together and I had painted different pieces. And, you know, just because of wind and logistics, it didn't look like what it looks like now. And so in the studio I had to tease the experience apart again and try and figure out what was cool, what I could remember of the the, you know, the intensity and the sort of emotion of the, of the day.

Yeah, yeah, it's fun to think about too, after you do these, kind of like if you could break pieces off to have as sort of individuals.

Mhm, yeah, I think about that a lot. Yeah, I have a favorite— my favorite panel in this, I think, is, you know, because it's 12 different panels and, you know, between 36 by 30 down to 6 by 6 inches. And so there's a 36 by 18 inch piece in the left of the center trunk that I love. As an individual piece, it's almost totally abstract, and I think, you know, I almost just wanted to keep it when I first got it into the studio and let the rest of the painting go because it was not as large as it was at the time. You know, I did, yeah, 5 panels, I think, on location. But then as the painting grew and I, you know, figured everything else out, it became one of many.

When you say you did 5 panels on location, was that in one session, or is that over?

Yeah, one afternoon was what was the core of this piece. And I got to actually— it may have been more on location now that I look at them, but in terms of what was continuous, it clamped together on my easel. It was 5 panels. It was these kind of the center core here, and then around them I did some quick, you know, studies. And when I looked up in the sky, I just painted it literally these 6x6 squares in my hand.

Oh, cool.

And would hold them for whatever, half an hour while I was painting in my hands. And it got very messy. Yes, I think on location even these two were up in location. So probably 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 panels. And then a couple in the studio. Cool.

You have such a kind of just a bright aesthetic. Do you work with like a consistent palette? Or do you have go-to, like a go-to, like, set of colors that you use? Or do you just kind of see what you've got in your truck and work with it?

Well, I mean, yeah, I know I definitely have my go-to colors, you know, in terms of like, I, I have a set that I buy.

Okay.

And I don't really vary that a lot. I mix everything fresh every day, so there's never, you know, I, I can't think of any time I use pure paint except occasionally, maybe white, but honestly Even that, not really. I mean, not a pure unmixed color, I should say. Everything's pure paint, actually. But yeah, so there's a set. I mean, Gamblin and M. Graham are my two companies that I like the most. I like the consistency of what they do. And I like the feeling of how they mix the paint. And then I get some earth tones. Oranges, some yellows, a variety, and then go from there. Keep it pretty consistently laid out in my palette too.

Your, your, your palette, right? Yeah, it's like the giant Tupperware things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are awesome.

Yeah, my, my giant Tupperware, one of the many that I, I carry around.

Yeah, or, uh, one like clear storage boxes, I guess, are what they are.

Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, they slide under beds, they have wheels, and when I saw them, I was like, oh, that's perfect, I can slide them into my truck, and then I I can build a shelf on top, you know, and that's kind of where the idea came from.

So, okay, just to get really like crazy detailed, when you are prepping your, your palette, do you like put like a whole tube of color in there?

Yeah, so I have these—

because you use a lot of paint.

I use a tremendous amount of paint. Yeah, like that tree one we're talking about has 3 liters of paint in that one piece. Most pieces are between a liter and 2 if they're of any real size in my sort of spectrum of sizes. So 48 by 60 is almost always about a liter of paint these days. I don't know, I used to paint different, you know, and it's just been an ongoing development. But yeah, so I have a 20 by 16 paint carrier basically that I think— I think people usually use it to mix paint and also be their palette. I just have piles of paint in there.

Oh wow, okay.

That's all I do. And so that's my paint carrier.

Gotcha.

I mix colors fresh on a you know, I wipe down and scrape down my Tupperware, you know, storage box, uh, um, every day that I can on location. And then that's where I mix. And so I have, you know, I have a lid and I have the base and I can flip it up and then I can, you know, keep one clean for as long as possible and then switch it in. And it allows me— it gives me more time on location. And then I can save the color too and bring the color back in, right? So it's a really excellent visual notation device.

Makes sense.

Not a notebook, but works like a notebook plus on steroids. I don't know. I don't have to sit there writing, this is a really pinky magenta-y kind of yellow in this left quadrant. It's like, that doesn't work. It's too slow. And this is super fast and in the sort of flow of actually painting.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Do you use any like— I mean, I'm sure you use some kind of medium. But like to get like the thick impasto stuff, is there, um, just kind of like—

yeah, no, that's, that's what I mean when I say pure paint. I'm not using like a paste to add into it. I do use an alkyd medium, you know, on the recommendation of the paint maker at both companies, to even drying time through the layers and increase kind of the flexibility of the dried film on the surface. And and add some fat back into the colors that need it. Usually colors out of the tube need a little extra fat according to what I was told from Gamblin at one point.

Gotcha.

I suppose that depends on the paint company too, but yeah, so that's like a couple drops per inch that comes out of the tube, say. Gotcha. It's a little bit of walnut oil basically with alkyd added. Cool.

So obviously you use a palette knife or something like that.

Something like that, yeah. I actually don't like palette knives. Okay. I have a strong, strong dislike.

Or wait, spatulas, right?

Yeah, silicone spatulas. Yeah, and I didn't know this when I started, and bless the people who love palette knives. It's for me, I couldn't stand the scraping sound all the time when I was on location. If it's like 5 in the morning and you're—

'Cause of the metal on them?

Yeah, scraping, and so it's, "Gah, gah, gah," constantly. And whatever, it's fine. But I found out that aside from the sound, truly the palette knives, in my opinion, sometimes can impart a bit of sterility into paint texture and surface. It doesn't necessarily have the movement and the organic quality of a human personality.

Because it's so straight?

Yeah, it's such a straight edge thing. And some people use that to great effect. It's not— yeah. Judgment on anybody else's work about it, but for me, my taste, I found that I was— I felt it was— I was missing something that I loved about brushes when I was experimenting with palette knives and how to scale up, especially because the great thing about palette knives is they have this big surface and they apply paint really quickly and deeply and you can get very specific edges, which is essential to make sense of all the cacophony of color and motion that happens when one one paints. So then I found these silicone spatulas, and the minute I got one in my hand, that was it. I knew that that was my favorite.

It's like flexible too.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I use big brushes. A lot of people, you know, if you see my paintings in person or online especially, you wouldn't necessarily know there's a tremendous amount of brushwork usually, if my brushes are clean, which is admittedly not always. So I sometimes are no brushes. But when, when I have all my tools clean and ready, I love brushes because they have this flexibility. They, they, you know, they impart their bristles and their personality of age and time and wear that's gone into them. And, you know, there's kind of a cool story that each brush has by itself. And then there's special tools that have a really important place in at least my practice. The silicone spatulas are more versatile for me. Because again, I can get a tremendous amount of paint on there and I can cover, especially when I'm doing a 12-foot painting on location. I need to move extremely fast. And so they're pretty big and they scoop well. Yeah, they scoop well and all the paint you put on them goes right onto the canvas, whereas with brushes, a lot stays in the bristles and then you try and mix and you have a muddied color. And so it's easier to keep colors fresh. You know, there's a lot of these kind of embedded things that allow quick painting to happen. And it, you know, I don't know if it's exponentially changed my practice in terms of time commitment. But the amount of time I need to achieve a certain sense of color and structure and dynamism in work has really reduced over time. And in large part, I think, to just finding the right tools and learning how to use them. Cool. Yeah. So those silicone spatulas are awesome. Love them. And that's primarily what you see on the surface of my paintings because even if I use brush underneath, a lot of times I'll smooth out the surface so that I don't have too much interference from the bristles and the really thick paint. You get all these ridges. And in a dark spot, if you have a ton of ridges that are picking up a lot of light, it'll diminish the contrast and really diminish the impact.

So when you were starting painting, you went to liberal arts school, Bard College in the Northeast?

Yeah. Yeah.

And studied environmental science. Science or no?

Yeah, so I had a full ride. I had a full ride in science starting from day one in bachelor's. And then—

Did you study painting in school or did you paint before that or after that or when did that start to happen?

Yeah, I started painting in 2001 and that's when I started grad school. I mean, I had done stuff in high school or whatever, but it wasn't something— Yeah. Yeah. Artists who's like, I knew from 5 years old I was going to be an artist. And that wasn't me. I just was kind of like to draw. My mom is a wonderfully talented artist. And so I saw her paint and illustrate and such when I was growing up. But mostly, I just was kind of floating along and seeing what was interesting. And the scholarship I got got me into a school I really liked. And so I was happy to do that. Really happy about it. And Bard was great because it allowed me to focus, you know, on art and science at the same time. And I did know I wanted to take some sort of art courses at Bard because it's a pretty well-known art school in its own right, just in terms of the studio arts program and their curatorial programs for grad school and all that, and the MFA. It's great. Gotcha. So really wonderful place to be exposed to art. And so I took art classes parallel to my science courses and did that for 3 years and then ended up lumping my first year of grad school into my last year of undergrad. And that was more specifically in environmental policy. And I ended up with a Master of Science in Environmental Policy. During that time, I focused more on photography, actually, because I didn't have time to paint. And so photography kind of became my creative expression. And I'm really grateful, man. I would so advocate for artists to have to use a camera for a while too, because it was so different. The voice, the breadth of that particular medium was its own thing and taught me a lot about what I was interested in when I was painting versus what I was interested in when I was taking a photo. And also then just fundamental questions about composition and experimentation and having the opportunity to iterate on an idea in these days infinitely is such a luxury that we have. Whether it's on an iPad or a digital camera, you can do a bajillion different variations of one thing without any real risk to your final creation because you have undo and you have— Photoshop layers and all these things. You can Warhol anything you want. You can turn it into anything and then just go like, I hate it, I'm going to turn it back. It was like nothing.

No risk.

On an oil painting, I can't do that. If I think, oh, this looks like I'm off there, I better know what I'm doing before I go ahead and jump into it, or I better have some sort of escape plan or just risk getting stuck up a creek that I can't get back down. Right.

Having lost all that time, essentially.

Yeah. It's such a substantial investment that it can be very painful. And it's interesting. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, just how the value of that risk, I think, and what I had written just recently was talking about, came out of this thought process. The essential function that uncertainty and risk plays in propelling us forward, I think, is so important in terms of just— if you don't have that edge, you don't necessarily mobilize your full faculties. You don't necessarily realize what you're capable of. And I love plein air painting in part because it introduces an element of unpredictability and uncertainty in my process. Every day, I never know. I don't have the luxury of pre-planning what I'm going to paint. I just don't. Because even if I think, I'm going to go to that spot where there's a thunderhead, usually it's never the same. And very frequently what I think would be there in a strategic sort of, this is what the weather map says—

This might be cool to paint today, yeah.

—usually isn't what happens. Oftentimes the thunderhead won't develop over that mountain even though it has for the last 2 weeks. Weeks, it'll develop somewhere else, or whatever version of that happens. There's a spontaneous element and unpredictability that means if I dedicate 3 hours to driving to a spot and then it doesn't turn out how I hoped when I get there, well, I better figure out something else or else I've lost an entire day. And there's a pressure, and there's these things that can be super beneficial, I think, to a process of art and also kill it, honestly. I've definitely had days where all the worry and the concern or the uncertainty gets to me and my mood will decline. It cramps your— Cramps the free flow. And I don't necessarily catch the moment that I have to adjust my posture mentally or emotionally or whatever it is to receive the change in my plans. And if I can't adapt and instead I have this rigid rigid attachment to some other thing that wasn't ever going to be reality, that wasn't reality, that was just some image in my head, then usually that'll be a really rough day. And I'll have to come back into the studio process and take a few moments and remember what the point was, and then try again the next day type thing. Yeah. So I don't remember why I got off on that.

Yeah, that's right.

We're talking about, I guess, art at Bard. Oh, yeah, yeah. And painting, and then what happened in grad school with the digital photo sort of stuff that I was doing and the printing. And I informally showed that work. The value of the sort of freedom, that less risk in certain ways— I mean, there's plenty of risks in all sorts of things, but the particular quality of you don't lose a painting if you decide in, you know, iPad Procreate to do another layer and experiment with something completely wild. You can break open stuff in wonderful ways. And I felt like digital photography helped me do that with my own bigger creative practice.

And I think you mentioned also it kind of helps you work through and get to know composition and value and just design properties.

Yeah, I mean, you can do these micro variations and realize that you really actually— the inch left, an inch right really mattered. And that becomes some part of your muscle memory of a certain sort, I feel like, which is part of why now I can see I really benefited. Because when I'm on location, I don't have time to quibble over composition in the same way I once did. I just don't usually. I mean, less so now even with having a kid, but even without a kid, things change so quickly that whether I, you know, if I thought a cloud was going to be a certain mass in the composition, and then it completely and utterly changes, there's an adaptation I need to go through pretty quickly.

Right, like adding a panel.

Yeah, like adding a panel. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's cool to look back and then having gone to grad school and then start my career doing consulting work for big nonprofits and a tribe in New Mexico and teaching for the University of New Mexico and doing these these variety of different faces of environmental work that eventually started merging back into my art I did not expect. And the manner that that happened was interesting. And eventually then there was a point at which I just came to a— I guess I had and saw that I wanted to go back into painting full-time, which felt like an odd jump to make after doing a lot of work that was directly helping people who were trying to get a job to be able to just put food on the table and stuff, and that was satisfying in a special way. And art is spiritually nourishing, but it doesn't necessarily help that person who doesn't have bus fare get bus fare. It might. I mean, I've actually been blown away in the ways that it actually has. Like if I donate a painting to an organization that's doing housing to women, it's been more financially helpful than than I oftentimes was when I was doing my career fundraising. That's been a total fun surprise. That's really cool, yeah. And so what a joy it is to be able to actually have something I adore and get to have fun doing help somewhere else for people who really need it. That's been amazing. But there was another little leg of that notion, which is— The part I didn't expect, because doing a lot of work environmentally, I met a lot of people on business side of things, and oil and gas, or Major League Baseball, or whatever. I mean, all sorts of weird, sort of fun clients and projects that I got to participate in. And then teaching for UNM, I was trying to get my students, or trying to relate to people on an emotional level about something that's a really big deal, which is how we relate to our environment as a species and what we do to other species on the planet. And these are all choices that we collectively make, even if individually we don't. Our single choice is a drop in a large ocean. The collective is the ocean. But what got me was that— so I was trying to hit my students with a real emotional argument, but I was doing it from a place where they weren't really buying it. In a way I was hoping for. And then when I went and started doing what was really resonating for me, which is sort of paying homage to these places in the land and places in cultural landscape. I mean, I have a 10-foot painting of a gas station at night over there. I don't know if you ever saw that. But it doesn't have to be some big vista. Lots of things have this experience of place and landscape to them.

Well, you've got the Volvo excavator up there, too. Yeah, right.

I mean, I love that painting. That's one of my favorites that I've kept for myself. It's just something about it just got me. And it's a frickin' Volvo excavator. It's like the little boy in me was so happy that day. What was happening was the interstate was being constructed, and they were actually bringing a deceleration lane next to an old historic New Mexico chapel. And the interstate's vibration is cracking the face of the chapel. And there's this really interesting story behind— Yeah. The mountain peak that's sort of behind this excavator and behind the story of the excavator in the image is this whole milieu of related needs and purposes and human life and then the natural landscape. So anyway, trying to talk about this stuff in class kind of got long in the tooth. It didn't really grab people. But then sharing something that grew out of a passion and a love a love that I have, oftentimes was hitting people at a really strong emotional level that blew my mind. I had no expectation that that would happen, and really ended up meaning a lot to me. And so it's mysterious. The unfolding of these things is mysterious.

Maybe it's just like your most simple expression of truth or something.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I hope so.

Easier to communicate. I don't know.

Yeah, right, when it's not so constipated with all these judgments and assessments, whether you're polite or impolite in how you judge and assess and what you decide to do with your opinions. It still is a very tricky sort of unwieldy mass of anything to deal with whenever you talk about any of these social, economic, environmental dimensions. Bajillions of people are involved, and therefore it's a complex conversation to be had. So there's something in just the direct— I don't know if purity is the word, but simplicity maybe I'd say— of getting to be on location and look down like at this painting of the gorge right in front of us. That's a 1,000-foot deep rift that volcanoes made however many millions of years ago, and now this beautiful river runs at the bottom of it, there's just a simplicity of looking deep into that and trying to find something that feels alive in the visual stimulation of being there and also the tactile feeling of smelling the sagebrush and feeling the rain out in the distance pushing wind towards me and getting that smell of moisture, which is so apparent here in New Mexico because it's so dry and so moist. When a thunderstorm's coming, you can really You can really smell the rain in a uniquely desert kind of way, I guess, high desert way. And there's something just very comforting for me in that, that I seem to have needed spiritually or for my soul or just general well-being. So I'm very grateful to get to keep doing it. So were you just starting?

And you started just painting kind of on the side and people started responding to it? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, after grad school I went back to painting for a while. So I went painting and science and then total science immersion in grad school with some photography. And then I got out of there and I wanted to do more painting. So I was doing interiors of my niece in her room. And she was like a teenager. And she had a wall of photos and a flat screen little tiny TV. TV on her dresser and was working on her laptop and a comforter billowing off of her bed and then a wood floor and a stool and a water container and a window and this insanely complex portrait. Yeah, very busy. I wanted to capture totality of a space. And I realized that the person existing within all this stuff of our life had such a story that I was really interested in. Of painting is not something that I left because I was done. It just happened that landscape became my obsession and has remained so, so far. I have seen some of my interest return into people, some, and cultural landscape, especially like the gas station or the excavator, road signs, or habitation. And my Lou Allen solo right now is a painting out the back door of our house in winter. You can see all the houses in our neighborhood. It's very rural, so there aren't many. But the fences and the story of human habitation has been reentering my work. Not by any design exactly, but just the sort of progression of its own.

So what was the first painting that you— either the first painting you sold or your first show that you felt like was a success or something?

Yeah, I guess it's that kind of mystery of progression I think I was just hitting me a little bit while I was talking, we were chatting here. Because I'd say the first show I really put together was at Bard. And I put it up at the school. And it was a combination of sketches from living in the back country in Montana. Photos and some travel I did to Ghana on a couple occasions. And I put together this almost travelogue type of exhibit, though at the time I wasn't conceptually aware of that. It just was stuff I— just what you were doing. Yeah. —just reflective of my life. And in hindsight, it was kind of— I would talk about it maybe differently. But for me, that was a real success because I put it up in front of a bunch of people. And it was a lot of work. And it was hard to do. And I had to go through a lot of thinking to learn at that point what I was even doing. Yeah. But that wasn't for sale. It was just the measure of a personal moment of achievement. In terms of selling work and especially this leg of oil painting as my primary mode of artistic expression, my first really successful financially show and where I started to put put together what has become my voice of sorts for the last decade or more was I'd say 2013 was really when it started taking off here in Taos, actually. And it was a tremendously successful show from a sales standpoint. And that was where the first real genuine solo I had and where things I think started to get momentum. I'd had work in a group show that I'm really proud of having been a part of up in Denver the year before called Taos Contemporary. And that was a curated— a show curated by a couple people involved with Metropolitan State University and the Center for Visual Art up there in Denver. And that had us— was a survey of art practice in Taos. It's an art colony that's pretty famous and what's happened throughout history. Question of what's going on now, because there's so many people living here that you would never know that don't show in town necessarily and are world famous. Interesting. So that was really cool because I had work up with Larry Bell or Ken Price and a bunch of other artists who I just adore and who are so committed to their practice and have found stuff that I find to be personally meaningful for me and then also critically is found acclaim or whatever else. And it was a real fun show to be a part of. So that was a big moment. And then since then, I'd say the recent shows I've put up the last couple of years at Lou Allen Galleries at Santa Fe, and then this one that's at Altamira in Jackson Hole right now, they've kind of been a combination of things I didn't expect because my work has sold pretty well for a while now. I'm lucky, really, fortunate. I mean, I work hard, but it doesn't mean work's going to find a home necessarily. But these have had a combination of something going on that's been exciting. I don't know what it is yet because I'm in the middle of it again. It's like a new leg of learning. But there's something about it. Getting to put up the show in Jackson Hole is some of the biggest work work I've ever done on location, or off actually, and all in one show. And they put it up, and it felt like I was walking into— if I didn't know I was in the gallery, I would have thought, well, this is like a museum. And it felt like— That's cool. Yeah, that was a weird feeling. I don't mean to be arrogant or sound arrogant about it, but I mean the honest experience was that this feels so spacious and has breadth. And I feel something I didn't know I was going to feel it, because in the studio, I don't— I mean, I get to hang my stuff up. I have a great studio, but it's not the same as gallery.

Yeah, you don't see it presented like that.

Yeah, and it's not done and over. I'm sitting here thinking, I can do something more with that, and this is not right, and I may have to repaint. It's not a spaciousness. And so seeing it in Jackson Hole, this recent show, was really exciting. And it had a conceptual framework that was fun for me. There was some conceptual things that I've been— have been percolating for a while, but I haven't known how to get them to come out of the work in a way that's new.

Yeah, it's like there is something— and I haven't seen the show in person. I would love to be able to get up there and see it. I don't think it's going to happen. But there's some kind of more straight contemporary art vibe to some of it than just more like some of the traditional landscape stuff, even though a lot, you know, landscape, like your— I don't know, did you title it Roy G Biv? Like your— the—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so, so I had the Spectrum, yeah, the Spectrum pieces that I did. Those are cool. Which all sold to one person. I was like, that— I really— I didn't think it was going to happen, man, cuz that was a— that's a big bite. I think I looked—

I like, I was like zooming in on the picture to see if they were like individual or if it was like a group piece. I was like, this would not be the same separate.

No, well, and I like them separate. And I thought I didn't want to price work in such a way that it was not attainable for people who are passionate about it. It's always a dilemma because that painting took 2 months to— that work took 2 months to figure out and a bunch of mistakes. And there's a tremendous amount of embedded costs. So it's just a lot expensive. They're expensive to do, period. When a frame on one piece is however many thousands, it's scary. Difficult. I've used this word scary because I don't want to pretend as if to people who are listening or my friends when I talk about it who are wanting to approach art, I don't want to sound as if it's some answered thing that's settled or that all of a sudden something happened and I was successful and I was making money to pay for my house and food and everything was okay and I didn't feel concern and fear and uncertainty. And it's like that hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed really is this awareness that the uncertainty is coming along with me whether or not I'm okay with it. So I probably want to try to find a way to befriend it rather than combat it.

That's an important realization.

Oh man, it's really important and so hard. I mean, I'm crap at it. I mean, I'm better than I was, but it's not like— I posted that bit on Instagram because I had spent like a week being like, I can't stand not painting. I don't know what to do. And I was driving myself crazy. And I was like, wait a second. All right, I've been painting almost 20 years. And I know that there's ups and downs. And I know— and I've been doing these shows for about 10 years now in some way, shape, or form. And I know that there's just a space that is necessary, that is essential, that is a healthy, appropriate space after doing a big push. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to not want to fill in that space. Space with jitter.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you talk about having that feeling of uncertainty. And you can understand it and be certain that there will be uncertainty. But that doesn't mean you don't still feel it. Yeah, right, right.

Yeah. So these shows, the Altamira one with this Roy G. Biv set, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, the spectrum of— what happens theoretically in light, which I found out in doing this project is kind of outdated and not actually accurate. But it was good enough. It's an approximation. We'll go with it. And it looked cool and felt great. And it ended up being— it was of the Grand Teton in this sort of really reduced down composition of the peak. And taking instead of the grand range— we'd usually on location, what I'm out there doing is trying to pay homage to the totality of feeling. And there I was. Was in one of the most spectacular ranges anywhere that I've ever been, US or beyond. Just so vertical, so extreme. And I was on location, and I did a wide painting in plein air in 2015. And then I did a vertical one, and I did this weird composition. I hated it, and I brought it to the studio after this road trip. And then after 3 or 4 days, started to be like, I think I like it. It was one of those ones that changed as I As I sat with it for a while, it's such a good reason to not destroy things unless you were so certain that you have to. Because it ended up being that after I sat with it for a while, I started really almost laughing because it struck me as so humorous to look at this most profound of mountains as if it had turned into a high school yearbook photo in terms of composition. It was like, here I am. I'm the Grand Teton. I'm just the face of the Grand Teton and the peak. And there's no context. And it just looked like he was from the Grand Teton from the shoulders up. And something about that struck me as so funny for me as a miniature little human who's going to be here for a blip, a raindrop on the face of this timeless mountain. To look at it in such a cropped-in way is to reduce down the totality in such a way. And it started being a really vibrant intellectual terrain for me, thinking about my role as as an artist, but as a person, and the advent of all social media in the last two decades, and all these things that are going on that frame the world quite literally, and our understanding of it in a really specific way. I mean, this whole multi-panel series is the same idea of how we frame our world. And as an artist, I'm framing it all the time. I'm choosing. And what does that do to the thing I'm painting?

The idea of thinking of Grand Teton is like, kind of like a cute picture is pretty funny and an interesting contradictory thought. But also, if you come at it from a different side where you're looking at it, it's almost like one of the out panels of your panel building composition without the rest of it.

Yeah, yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. Well, so in the arc of my creative process, I think that's exactly right. There's this gap in what I've been doing. And all of a sudden, there was 20 paintings of the Grand Teton in this solo show that didn't have, as of yet when I went into it, a context that I understood. Or I didn't understand why all of a sudden I was doing a bunch of these. Because the palette, if you look at New Sneakers, is ridiculous. I mean, I love it. It's so fun. But it's ridiculous. It's like fuchsia and bright yellow. Yellow and royal blue smashed together, scraped down as if it were some sort of woodcut sort of print, and then put back on, and really smashing together technique and color in a way that I wouldn't have done. And it was because I saw a new pair of Nikes or something that I thought were really fun. And I like loud sneakers. I like nice mundane leather shoes or something, but I like loud sneakers when I'm buying running shoes or basketball shoes. That made it into the painting. And then it became kind of like an Instagram or a Snapchat filter placed on top of this mystical peak, which I found out is like a— it's a site for vision quests for the tribes that have lived under that mountain range for a long, long time. And there's a real gravity to it. I mean, you can't be there without feeling that gravity. But then there's— Almost like physics definition too. Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, because it's got a lot of mass. That's right.

Yep. And so anyway, so it just became this outgrowth. And the Roy G. Biv said, I guess what was interesting was at first it seemed almost like blasphemy to my sort of serious artist self. I'm serious, and it's my job to be authentic all the time. And great, those are essential things, but also it can get a little stuffy and too much, too much. And so to do this, at first it seemed like a humorous take, and I started, I immediately, back in 2015 and 2016, was starting to cook on this idea. I wanted to do like 48x36 panels right after Warhol and literally just take the colors that Warhol had done in certain pieces of Marilyn Monroe or other pop icons, media icons, and put them into the Grand Teton. I didn't know why. And I didn't get to it until this year. And they weren't 48x36s in set. It ended up being that I started this study and these little ones based on the plein air work I did, and then started varying the colors more and more to more extremes. And I went after— one of the first was Marilyn Monroe that Warhol did, and took that palette and applied it to the Grand Teton. And I did it with painting rather than printing because I wanted the drawing to change over time. I didn't want to have the stress and the notion that I had to shoehorn my draftsman quality into this group group. I wanted to see what happens with sort of letting each painting be drawn roughly the same, aiming, but seeing the human fallibility or something, the changeable.

Well, plus that's kind of like your process and your signature at the moment too. Right, right.

Yeah, you know, right, sure. I have process-evident work. I mean, that's, you know, what I'm interested in these days. I'm certainly not trying to remove the artist's presence from the work in this case, though I don't want it to be about me. I I don't want there to be the sense of the mark of a person having made it. I actually really don't even like signing my work because I don't want to have some notion of a personality too involved with what the painting is about. But anyway, yeah, so this Grand Tetons set of pieces just appeared. I didn't know what they were about. And like you were saying, they were kind of an outlier, a broken, discontinuous section of my creative process at the time. And then I started seeing that there was this question of icon and how we look at things. And I realized I go on trips location, in a sense, to pay homage and to bring something back that I can offer to the world that helps other people access something, I hope, that is meaningful for them, whatever that might be. And this Grand Teton series then started to take on a totally different dimension, especially as I started to study up about the area and the mountain and understand some of the ancient history and the geologic time scale history, as well as the more recent history. And then Bringing it right up into Instagram lately has been on my mind a lot because it's such these little snapshot worlds and all this perfect stuff. And people always make fun of that Insta life or the Pinteresty kind of life. Right. Whatever. It's all fine and good, maybe. I don't know. But the impression that people leave versus the reality behind the scenes. And I started, again, that question of the difference between the single one color you know, painted of the Grand Teton when it's this infinite color field actually that's hitting it. And taking just one— I mean, one in quotation, air quotations I'll say, because my red in that painting is not just red.

Right, like a dominant. Yeah, a dominant theme. Feeling of a color.

You wouldn't look at one of them and say, I don't know what color that is. It's red. It's yellow. It's orange. Anyway, so then that started to be kind of a cool idea. And then it went from just one— I thought I was going to do one color, and it started growing. And the whole set— I think there's so many different things that came up for me in taking this material into the studio rather than keeping it plein air. Because in the studio, it's just another side of the coin of space and time. It's a different pace. So that show up in Jackson's been really fun. That's cool. Yeah, the one in Santa Fe too. But there's a bunch of experiments this year that I put up to see see what happens, you know, ones that were messing with surface or playing with more contemporary art critical questions on my mind about painting and why I'm painting in an era, you know, an age of digital media and installation artwork and experiential artwork. And that's an important question. Yeah, yeah, let me know if you have an answer. Yeah, exactly, same.

Thanks again, Jevon, for your time and for your hospitality in your studio. Thanks for chatting. Once again, check out the page on the website at western.gallery for the new Western Talent Show opening on May 8th, entirely online. And if you happen to catch this episode right when it comes out, you've got a week left to enter. So check out the call for entries if you are an artist and you're interested. Thanks again so much for your time, everybody. Thanks for listening. Thank you for the reviews. Keep them coming. And until next time, I'm George Irwin. That's my last name. See you later.