In this viewing room Crown Point Press presents a new color etching by Los Angeles-based artist Hilary Pecis. Pecis worked in intaglio for the first time when she came to the Crown Point studio in February of 2025, creating this vibrant color aquatint "Lemons and Camellias".

Hilary Pecis is known for creating joyful still-life and landscape paintings inspired by photos she takes of urban lanscapes and domestic interiors. Her landscapes record scenes from her daily runs in Los Angeles, whether from a mountain trail or of the many strip malls dotting the city. Her still-life paintings feature crowded tables littered with books, flower arrangements, or the remains of a meal. The paintings are like portraits, each component like a reflection of a person. Pecis never includes the entire human figure in her work. In an Artnet interview, Pecis said, “I feel the same way about photographs of myself that I do about painting a person… I just don’t think it sums up who I am. It’s just a flattening out of a person.” Pecis uses her photographs to create a rough outline of the scene on the canvas, then she paints until there isn’t any negative space left. The vivid colors she uses reference Fauvism in their intensity. The gestural and textured mark-making she employs draws the viewer’s eyes on a path through the painting. She revisits each composition often, and moves between paintings when she feels stuck. In the Crown Point Press Studio, Pecis used color aquatint and sugar lift aquatint to create the exuberant print, Lemons and Camellias. The etching uses seven plates to create all the details of the leaves, lemons, and flowers. Pecis said to Crown Point’s director Valerie Wade that “in working with the master printer, we decided to… embrace much of the magic that the medium could provide us with.” Hilary Pecis was born in Fullerton, California in 1979 and she lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BFA in 2006 and her MFA in 2009 from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Pecis’ work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico; the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; the Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, among others. She is represented by the David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; the Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; the SPURS Gallery, Beijing; and the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.