My work is about the idea of how seeing is an organized activity. Human perception feels immediate, but it is often constructed through spatial, pictorial, and cultural frameworks that rarely announce themselves.  

I’m interested in how those frameworks can be made visible through form. Each decision of proportion, alignment, interval and edge is intentional. The aim isn’t to complicate the image, but to make its internal structure legible over time – revealed. What I’d want a reader to notice first is that sense of intention. The work doesn’t resolve all at once; it unfolds as relationships begin to register.

May paintings are sometimes described as minimal, even generously minimal, but that’s not quite right. It’s less about reduction than about concentration—how much awareness can be carried within a set of formal decisions on the canvas. 

My body of work sits between architecture and painting, shaped by both but fully contained by neither. Architecture established a way of thinking—through proportion, sequence, and the structuring of experience—while painting allowed those concerns to remain open, to be tested without closure.

My approach is grounded in a formalist tradition, but one that treats form as active—something that produces perception rather than simply organizing it. At the same time, it operates within a present condition defined by the rapid consumption of images, where attention is often compressed. The work resists that pace.  

The shift toward it developed gradually. Somewhere about 25 years ago, I became more interested in relationships that couldn’t be fully captured by designing for the built environment.  I wanted to create conditions that depend on perception, on the viewer completing the work in real time. Painting, along with writing, became a way to expand this space of inquiry.

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Ongoing Thread. More from Lee Hill to follow