Landscape paintings are meant to be windows to the natural world. But painter Jivan Lee asks the question: What if one window isn’t enough?
He answers the question with an ongoing exhibition, The Infinite Landscape, at the new Lunder Research Center at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site in Taos, New Mexico. Lee’s work begins with one image that then unfolds to reveal additional panels as the subject expands outward and upward. It can be compared to unfolding origami, but he also likens it to Tetris blocks cascading down to form strange, disjointed shapes. 
Jivan Lee with The Cottonwood, 90 x 100” on 12 panels.
“This all comes out of an ongoing body of work that really asks viewers to think about how they look at the landscape and then uses that as a means to explore how we perceive nature. Paintings can present a nice and neat story with their frame and format, their compositions, because everything applies to the spaces,” Lee says. “I wanted to explore freely within the space, from the bright cloud on the horizon, to the piñon and juniper in the distance, to the chamisa in the foreground, then jump way into the sky. I want to work outside of the rectangle by taking a panel and letting that start the initial shape of the piece, but then follow that thread wherever it leads, even if it’s onto a new panel.”
Strong Upward Lift, 2018, oil, 54 x 84” on four panels
Lee lives in Taos and finds a great deal of inspiration near him, including in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that surround the historic city in Northern New Mexico. The exhibition is taking place at one of the most historic destinations in all of Taos, the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, home to the Eanger Irving Couse home and studio and two Joseph Henry Sharp studios.
He admits the only limitation on his Tetris-like paintings is the final size of the finished work. “There are no limitations on size and shape, but logistically speaking there might be,” he says. “If I can’t reach 8 feet high on location then I don’t paint on an 8-feet-tall painting unless I have a special rigging.” Lee currently paints from several easels on location, and as the painting grows bigger he simply adds another easel to accommodate the expanded image. 
Monument 23 – Totality, 2021, oil, 48 x 78” on two panels
These works are best represented by the 90-by-100-inch, 12-panel work titled The Cottonwood. It’s one of the centerpieces of The Infinite Landscape and shows how he takes one central subject—in this case, a cottonwood tree—and expands upon the initial idea. New panels are added for the tree’s shadow, for green vegetation nearby, a cluster of trees in the distance and different areas of the tree’s canopy as light shines through the leaves and between the branches. Five panels of the work aren’t even attached to the main grouping, as if they are islands in an archipelago.
Occasionally the final design is left to chance, like when he goes back to his truck to get another panel and only has a certain size or shape.“I guess we’ll do this then,” he says. “It can all happen because of an unexpected development.”
The Gorge, In Four, 2019, oil, 85 x 65” on four panels
While The Cottonwood is one of the more complex works in the show, many of the pieces are more straightforward and feature four or less panels. In Monument 23 – Totality, Lee uses just a pair of panels. The right panel holds most of the information with a beautiful sky above the Rio Grande Gorge outside of Taos. But then the left panel is a continuation of the scene, but only of the clouds and sky. The shape of the work accentuates the sky in the additional piece, and it also seems to draw more attention to the land in the larger work—the effect can have complementary and also opposing forces at work together. 
10,000 Mountains – Winter 2021; March 13, 2021, oil (seven panels, six on view)
In other paintings, including 10,000 Mountains and Six Moments, Lee paints the same or similar scenes, but at different times of day or with different weather. This creates a unique juxtaposition with time as it leaps from painting to painting.
Other works are fascinating in their simple arrangements of panels, including Strong Upward Lift, with its upside-down T shape, and The Gorge, In Four, which has three identically shaped panels and then a fourth that is slightly shorter than the rest. 
Six Moments, 2018, oil, 6 x 50” on six panels
“Late winter at the big view south of Taos,” Lee says of The Gorge, In Four. “This piece was a product of the happenstance of logistics attendant to my outdoor painting setup—I had only four panels with me, and only three were the same size. With this series being about happenstances of attention and the ‘frames’ our human activity overlays onto the landscape, the limitation felt like a good way to visualize the theory. So I arranged the work to emphasize the picture-window sense of looking out into the landscape, with the asymmetric upper right quadrant omitting a key area of the image. I both love it and wish it were there; the missing bit leaves me wanting more and simultaneously more engaged with the piece and image.”
Jivan Lee painting in plein air at one of his favorite spots in the Taos area.Davison Koenig, the executive director and curator at the Couse-Sharp site, is excited to have a Taos artist showing in the great Taos destination. “Jivan Lee as a contemporary Taos painter represents a continuum with the Taos Society of Artists going back over 100 years, artists whose work has forever changed how we view Taos Valley,” he says. “Just as we can now see Ernest Blumenschein’s geometric rhythm in the trees of the mountains, Victor Higgins’ armadas of monsoon clouds and Henry Sharp’s afternoon shadows climbing an adobe wall, Jivan Lee provides a portal to viscerally immerse ourselves in the dynamic and infinite landscape of Taos.” —
The Infinite Landscape
Through November 30, 2022
The Lunder Research Center at Couse-Sharp Historic Site, 138 Kit Carson Road, Taos, NM 87571
(575) 751-0369, www.couse-sharp.org
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