I met Hilary Pecis as most of us meet in the art world, via email. It was 2015 and she was working as a registrar at a Los Angeles gallery and over the next four years we would be in touch regularly to manage the less than sexy post-acquisition logistics of moving art around. I wouldn’t know this until later, but we met within a year of Hilary moving to LA and becoming a new mom. In those critical early years here in LA she would solidify the painting practice for which she is so well known now.
When I think of Hilary’s paintings from that time I think of small scale, tightly cropped snapshots of interiors—her own and her friends’—as well as familiar scenes of LA landscapes. The scale and subject matter seemed very pragmatic for a new mom, working a fulltime job and maintaining a painting practice. Reflecting on this I couldn’t help but think of the late great Luchita Hurtado who maintained her practice while raising her son by making works on paper and smaller scale paintings when space and time were limited. While Luchita was her own subject within and beyond domestic spaces, Hilary delivers her own brand of portraiture by zeroing in on the objects and places that make up the person.
