Hilary Pecis: Painting the Poetry of the Everyday

From sunlit interiors to overlooked city corners, Hilary shares how memory, mood, and meandering walks shape her quietly vibrant scenes.

Known for her luminous, pattern-rich paintings of interiors, landscapes, and city scenes, artist Hilary Pecis transforms the ordinary into quietly radiant tributes to daily life. Often devoid of figures, her work instead captures human presence through personal details - books on a nightstand, fruit on a kitchen table, a shadow on a wall - allowing viewers to inhabit these spaces as their own.

Pecis draws from photographs she takes during walks or travels, distilling her compositions with a memory-driven approach that favours mood and rhythm over realism. Her recent shift from lush domestic interiors to overlooked public spaces for example stoops, sidewalks, and street vendors reveals her continued fascination with where the visual and emotional intersect.

Whether working from the sunlit streets of Southern California or a quiet café abroad, Pecis’s vibrant palette and compositional fluidity reflect a deep appreciation for the slow, sensory richness of everyday life. Through her work, she invites us to see beauty not in grand gestures, but in the patterns and pauses we might otherwise overlook.

We sat down to talk to her after visiting her Los Angeles studio with our Club members.

The human figure is generally absent from your scenes. What does this symbolise for you?

There is enough information in the paintings to suggest to humans and human-ness that I don't feel the need to add the figure in the paintings. I personally find them to be distracting - at least when they are in my paintings, perhaps due to my lack of people - painting skill, so I typically don't include them. When I do, they are usually in a framed photo.

You have a unique process, forgoing more-traditional methods like preliminary sketches in favour of phone photography and memory. What can you share about this method?

I like to make a quick sketch directly on the canvas from an image from my phone or a printed photo (from my phone). I usually use the photo just long enough to figure out the basic composition and elements that I found appealing in the original image. I like to take plenty of creative liberties to simplify the painting, deducing it in a way that makes sense to me, giving it more of the vibe that I felt when I was in the place itself.

We loved your solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in New York last year, with its vibrant depictions of the Southern California landscape. Your current show at Timothy Taylor in London shifts attention to scenes that are often overlooked: stoops, curbs, a busy pier, a street vendor’s stand. What prompted this change in focus?

The show with David Kordansky Gallery was for the most part based on the LA landscape and my experience running through the streets and trails of LA. With the show I am about to open in London with Timothy Taylor, I wanted to open it up and make it about the delights I come across while meandering in LA and elsewhere. There are so many visual pleasures when we have the opportunity to slow down and look around. The paintings in Wandering depict scenes in Palm Springs, Brooklyn, Colorado, Greece, and of course Greater LA. I love what happens when we have the luxury of time to wander: conversations with friends, self discoveries, and artistic inspirations.

Your paintings often feel like quiet celebrations of daily life, filled with books, plants, and traces of human presence. What makes a moment or a scene worth capturing for you?

I like to paint a place that I find visually appealing whether it be a landscape or table scape. Varying colors and textures and something that encourages movement within the composition. Landscapes often include the traces of humans: streetscapes, signage, footprints. I love the way that a composition can move a viewer's eye all over the canvas. Sometimes an exciting composition is simply the impetus to start a painting, but I love to take that opportunity to try to raise the overall intensity of the painting throughout.

Colour and pattern play such a strong role in your work. How do you approach composing a palette, and what influences your use of colour?

When choosing a palette, I often start with the colors that most closely resemble the live version of the objects and places depicted. But as the painting evolves, I oftentimes respond to the surrounding colors and make adjustments as I see fit. Pattern is often how I depict texture, so in addition to painting patterns that exist on objects there is the texture that reads as pattern.

Are there any emerging artists you’re particularly drawn to?

I like the intimate and effortless paintings that Claudia Keep makes. Megan Reed makes vibrantly colored plaster sculptures that always feel musical to me. I’m often drawn to sculptures - perhaps it’s because I don’t think in a three dimensional way, but I love some of the ceramicists here in LA such as Jennifer Rochlin and Jasmine Little, both of whom are making incredible vessels very different from one another.

If you could step into any painting in history (not your own!), which would it be?

I absolutely love Gabriele Münter and her vibrant paintings. I don't know if I want to live "in" her paintings but I would love to know what it would have been like to be her working as her at that time. She was so ambitious and prolific and she worked in a time when there weren't many female artists. As a member of Der Blaue Reiter she was part of the avant garde in Germany at the time, and has positioned herself in the canon alongside the other members like Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Marianne von Werefkin.

Hilary’s latest show Hilary Pecis: Wandering is now on view at Timothy Taylor in London until 19 July. Catch it while you can!