LONDON — Hilary Pecis relies a lot on her third eye for inspiration, but instead of seeing auras, chakras or future scenarios, she spots interestingly shaped cracks in walls, neat rows of slits on ventilation grilles and stacks of secondhand books on a sidewalk table.
If the lines, angles and patterns are interesting, she can’t resist. Anything — weeds, stoplights, peeling paint — can inspire her bright, intense figurative paintings.
“There’s so much fodder everywhere, good material all over the place. Even when I look at the carpet beyond my computer right now, I’m loving the way the fibers are falling next to each other,” says Pecis during a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles home.
“Or maybe I’m just easily amused,” adds Pecis, who once painted a sign she saw in a bathroom because it looked just right. “Composition and color are important, and I really like it when things all come together. That’s what makes a picture for me.”
Pecis’ latest paintings, drawn from her long-distance runs (she’s at it six days a week, often training for marathons) and travels in and around Los Angeles, are on display at Timothy Taylor in a solo show called “Wandering,” which runs until July 19.
“Hotel Pool”
During her wanderings she takes pictures on her phone, and brings the patterns and shapes to life with vibrant acrylic paint that covers “every square inch” of her linen canvases.
In “Hotel Pool,” Pecis captures curtains disturbed ever so slightly by an imaginary breeze; indentations in the cushions on lounge chairs, and the folds and wrinkles of still-damp towels on the orange sunbeds.
In “Book Vendor” she takes a close-up look at stacks of used books, magazines and catalogues, most of them written in Greek. They’re piled every which way on a metal table, in plastic crates or cardboard boxes.
To Pecis, the book covers are as inspiring as their uneven edges. She lovingly paints a chain link fence behind the stand, the tiles on the pavement and the triangular crack on the wall under the table.
Sometimes she gives herself over to the patterns entirely as in “Snowy Morning.” In that painting, there is no central focus, just a field trampled with footprints.
“Book Vendor”
“There’s nothing that we’re looking at other than pock-marked snow, but I love the zigzagging of the snow, and the light, and the subtlety of the pastel colors in the sky. There wasn’t a bird in the middle, or any focal point, but I felt motivated simply from the composition,” she says.
Although Pecis starts by snapping scenes and compositions on her phone, she soon discards those images and lets her gut take over.
“I make a really fast, shitty painting, and then I just keep editing and tightening. That’s why the paintings have a bumpiness, a wonkiness to them. It’s not like the work of a really sexy man painter, abstract, goopy, texture and paint,” she says.
“It’s more like ‘Oh jeez, I’ve made a bunch of mess-ups, and I’m just gonna keep painting over them.’ I’m constantly editing down until it’s as tight as it can be. It’s also how I go about life. I just make a bunch of errors and then kind of clean them up along the way,” Pecis adds.
She has a healthy approach to her day-to-day, treating studio work much like a 9-to-5 job so she can spend as much time as possible with her young son. She also takes time — ideally, a year — to create paintings for her solo shows.
She runs in the morning — sometimes alone, and other times with friends or other artists — and believes there are so many parallels between the sport and painting.
“Free Box”
“There’s the cadence of the moves, and the [knowledge] that you’re moving forward and building. You’re not always making a masterpiece every day in the studio or with every run. But with consistency, you’re making a body of work, or a better body of work, or you’re building towards a better or faster marathon,” she says.
Her approach works. Her paintings reside in places such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Aïshti Foundation in Beirut.
A graduate of California College of the Arts, San Francisco, Pecis is also a cofounder of the L.A.-based Binder of Women, an independent platform for contemporary artists to share and promote their work and expand their reach.
She’s about to start work on her next solo show, which takes place in May in Los Angeles. Although she doesn’t offer up much detail, the focus will be on interiors rather than exteriors. “I don’t like for every show to have the same style of painting,” she says.
When she was in London for the opening of “Wandering,” she sampled all the major parks on her morning run — St. James’s, Green, Hyde, Regents and Hampstead Heath.
She marveled at the brightness of the flowers, visited the bathing ponds at Hampstead Heath, and says the images will inspire future work.
“Bakery Display”
When she’s not at home, in the studio or pounding the pavement, she’s collecting art. She loves sculpture in particular, although she’s hopeless at making it.
“If I have the opportunity to buy things, I usually buy small, tabletop sculpture. We all fetishize certain things, and I love things that have weight and that I can hold. It’s probably one of the things I love the most, because I don’t understand it as much.
“I work two-dimensionally, and I’ve never successfully made sculpture so there’s still some magic there that I don’t quite understand, an alchemy that I haven’t quite discovered,” says the artist who’s more than happy to embrace her own cracks and imperfections.