Your compositions are notable for their careful rhythm and spatial balance. To what extent is this sense of structure intuitive, and how much emerges through planning or revision?

I’m moved to make paintings from images that I find have an interesting composition. Sometimes that means I know I will be making a painting before I snap a photo, but more often than not, I just find a good photo in the hundreds of photos I take all the time.

We live in a time of excessive visual noise, and your focus on domestic and familiar spaces feels quietly subversive. What compels you to continue foregrounding the everyday in your work?

Well, I do enjoy slowing down to look and really examine a place, a thing, and the way they all connect. That said, I also really love a busy painting with plenty of visual fodder for the eye to take in.  I usually try to get the viewer's eyes to move around either by lines that connect or colours that triangulate over the composition.  

I think that choosing to be a painter today in general is an act of subversion, because you’re asking a viewer to look at something for more than 3 seconds. There’s little guarantee that anyone will enjoy what the artist produces, but the drive is there regardless.

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You’ve spoken about painting as a kind of endurance activity. How does this approach influence your daily studio practice and your relationship to time and labour?

Like any endurance sport, making an exhibition is a long game. It takes months - sometimes years - to bring a body of work together, and really, it’s the decades before that that form the foundation. That accumulated time, experience, and practice build the base on which everything else rests. A show doesn’t just come together all at once; it’s often something I’ve been thinking about or shaping in my head years in advance, and then slowly chipping away at in the studio.

There are phases - just like in any endurance activity - where you're building, pushing, and testing your limits, and others where you need to pause, reassess, or recover. That rhythm is really important. To sustain the work and keep it evolving, I have to give myself space not just to produce, but to take risks and make mistakes - because that’s often where the breakthroughs happen. So the endurance aspect isn’t just physical, it’s also about patience, resilience, and trusting that slow progress over time will lead to something meaningful.

Though your paintings frequently exclude the figure, they convey a strong sense of human presence and narrative. Do you think about the absence - or implied presence - of the body in your work?

I don’t actually think about the absence of the figure because the essence of people is so strong.  It’s rare that I paint a pristine landscape without evidence of humans. And more often than not, it’s a domestic space (both indoor and out) that depicts a clear picture of the people or person that inhabits the space.  In other landscape paintings, there are, at the very least, trails, sidewalks, signs, and trash.

I would be interested to know what role memory plays in your process, especially when returning to familiar photos or places. Do you find yourself altering the scene to match the embodied experience, or does the act of painting reshape the memory itself?

When I start a painting, I usually begin with a photograph, just to loosely map out the composition directly on the canvas. I use it as a guide to get the elements in place, but after that, I tend to put the photo aside and let memory take over. From there, it becomes more about capturing how the scene felt, rather than how it looked. I want the painting to hold the mood or energy of a place, rather than be a faithful reproduction of an image.

Colour is often where I take the most liberty - mountains shift into purples and pinks, skies turn bluish brown, and shadows become more exaggerated or distinct. I’ll heighten textures, push contrast, or adjust light in ways that probably wouldn’t show up in a photo, but feel closer to how I experienced it. I’m not interested in replicating the image - I’m more interested in painting the atmosphere, the emotion, the ‘vibe’ of a place as it lingers in my mind. So in that sense, I think memory and painting are always reshaping each other in real time.

Is there a particular object, image, or space you’ve encountered recently that felt urgent to capture? What does your initial process of translating that moment into a painting typically involve?

Actually, often my favourite paintings are the ones which I made from photos that I sat on for years.  Those are the ones that feel sweetest, because I probably felt that the image was going to be difficult to depict, or maybe it might be a failure for other reasons.  So when it’s finished and it wasn’t a failure, it feels like a little bit of magic was bestowed.  

But to answer your question, a couple of months ago, I had been making a painting for an art fair that I wasn’t happy with. In the middle of the night, I woke and remembered a recent photo I had taken. I decided to scrap the art fair painting, and decided to work double time to make a new painting with the photograph.  I worked overtime to finish the painting, and I was absolutely delighted with the outcome.  It was much better than the original painting.

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Do you feel that becoming a mother shifted your approach to time, routine, or the kinds of subjects you’re drawn to in your practice?

Yes - I have become more efficient with my time. Even if that means using the recovery moments well. Taking the much-needed lunch hour or weekend.  But perhaps that would have also changed with age? It’s easy to burn the candle at both ends when you’re younger, but at some point, the law of diminishing returns catches up, and the recharge and reset allow me to make better work.

Your use of pattern and compressed space often flattens perspective in a way that feels intentionally destabilising. Is this an aesthetic choice, or a way of engaging the genre of representational painting critically?

I represent space with the shrinking of pattern size rather than the change of colour or the muting of colour as it moves farther back in space.  This is an aesthetic choice since I also have chosen to rarely have colours blend from one to another on the surface of the canvas.

Your references to other artists - through books, artworks, or motifs - often feel like quiet acknowledgements within the frame. Do you think of these as gestures of homage, dialogue, or reinterpretation?

When I’m in the painting - especially in someone else’s space - I tend to stay very true to what’s actually there: the books, artworks, posters, and personal objects that make up their environment. So in that case, the references aren’t necessarily intentional nods, they’re simply part of what I see and choose to include. When I’m painting my own space, it’s much the same - I’m painting the books I’m reading, the art I live with, the images I’ve chosen to surround myself with. I love looking at art, and naturally that finds its way into the work. So yes, sometimes it’s a gesture of homage - especially when I get to paint an artwork I really admire - but it’s also just about being present with what’s in the room. There’s a quiet pleasure in letting those references live inside the frame, without needing to be too pointed or overthought.
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Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, California) is a Los Angeles–based painter known for her vivid still lifes, interiors, and landscapes that celebrate the everyday. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Pecis transforms scenes from daily life—domestic spaces, urban streets, and nature trails—into kaleidoscopic compositions drawn from photographs and memory.

Lore Alender is a writer and publicist based in London.