{"id":209999,"date":"2025-06-24T09:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T09:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/209999\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T09:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T09:18:10","slug":"painter-hilary-pecis-sees-beauty-in-weeds-wrinkles-and-wall-cracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/209999\/","title":{"rendered":"Painter Hilary Pecis Sees Beauty in Weeds, Wrinkles and Wall Cracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLONDON<\/a> \u2014<\/strong> Hilary Pecis<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the lines, angles and patterns are interesting, she can\u2019t resist. Anything \u2014 weeds, stoplights, peeling paint \u2014 can inspire her bright, intense figurative paintings.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s so much fodder everywhere, good material all over the place. Even when I look at the carpet beyond my computer right now, I\u2019m loving the way the fibers are falling next to each other,\u201d says Pecis during a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles<\/a> home.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOr maybe I\u2019m just easily amused,\u201d adds Pecis, who once painted a sign she saw in a bathroom because it looked just right. \u201cComposition and color are important, and I really like it when things all come together. That\u2019s what makes a picture for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPecis\u2019 latest paintings, drawn from her long-distance runs (she\u2019s at it six days a week, often training for marathons) and travels in and around Los Angeles<\/a>, are on display at Timothy Taylor in a solo show called \u201cWandering,\u201d which runs until July 19.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cHotel Pool\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tDuring her wanderings she takes pictures on her phone, and brings the patterns and shapes to life with vibrant acrylic paint that covers \u201cevery square inch\u201d of her linen canvases.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cHotel Pool,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cBook Vendor\u201d she takes a close-up look at stacks of used books, magazines and catalogues, most of them written in Greek. They\u2019re piled every which way on a metal table, in plastic crates or cardboard boxes.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSometimes she gives herself over to the patterns entirely as in \u201cSnowy Morning.\u201d In that painting, there is no central focus, just a field trampled with footprints. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cBook Vendor\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s nothing that we\u2019re 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\u2019t a bird in the middle, or any focal point, but I felt motivated simply from the composition,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlthough Pecis starts by snapping scenes and compositions on her phone, she soon discards those images and lets her gut take over.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI make a really fast, shitty painting, and then I just keep editing and tightening. That\u2019s why the paintings have a bumpiness, a wonkiness to them. It\u2019s not like the work of a really sexy man painter, abstract, goopy, texture and paint,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s more like \u2018Oh jeez, I\u2019ve made a bunch of mess-ups, and I\u2019m just gonna keep painting over them.\u2019 I\u2019m constantly editing down until it\u2019s as tight as it can be. It\u2019s also how I go about life. I just make a bunch of errors and then kind of clean them up along the way,\u201d Pecis adds.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe 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 \u2014 ideally, a year \u2014 to create paintings for her solo shows.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe runs in the morning \u2014 sometimes alone, and other times with friends or other artists \u2014 and believes there are so many parallels between the sport and painting.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cFree Box\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s the cadence of the moves, and the [knowledge] that you\u2019re moving forward and building. You\u2019re not always making a masterpiece every day in the studio or with every run. But with consistency, you\u2019re making a body of work, or a better body of work, or you\u2019re building towards a better or faster marathon,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer approach works. Her paintings reside in places such as the National Gallery of Art<\/a> in Washington, D.C.;\u00a0 Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a>; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and A\u00efshti Foundation in Beirut. <\/p>\n

\n\tA graduate of California College of the Arts, San Francisco, Pecis is also a cofounder of the L.A.-based Binder of Women,\u00a0an independent platform for contemporary artists to share and promote their work and expand their reach.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s about to start work on her next solo show, which takes place in May in Los Angeles. Although she doesn\u2019t offer up much detail, the focus will be on interiors rather than exteriors. \u201cI don\u2019t like for every show to have the same style of painting,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen she was in London for the opening of \u201cWandering,\u201d she sampled all the major parks on her morning run \u2014 St. James\u2019s, Green, Hyde, Regents and Hampstead Heath.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe marveled at the brightness of the flowers, visited the bathing ponds at Hampstead Heath, and says the images will inspire future work.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u201cBakery Display\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tWhen she\u2019s not at home, in the studio or pounding the pavement, she\u2019s collecting art. She loves sculpture in particular, although she\u2019s hopeless at making it. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf 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\u2019s probably one of the things I love the most, because I don\u2019t understand it as much. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI work two-dimensionally, and I\u2019ve never successfully made sculpture so there\u2019s still some magic there that I don\u2019t quite understand, an alchemy that I haven\u2019t quite discovered,\u201d says the artist who\u2019s more than happy to embrace her own cracks and imperfections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 Hilary Pecis relies a lot on her third eye for inspiration, but instead of seeing auras,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[2606,4021,4020,4022,77,257,556,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-209999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-london","14":"tag-los-angeles","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114737598003443121","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}