Serene Lee

Fragments of Living Together is a series of oil paintings that depicts the artist and her animals within the shared space of the home.

Working from direct observation, Lee builds each painting through prolonged looking and repeated sessions, returning to the same subjects over time as the relationships between them continue to develop. The animals in the series are not posed or arranged. They appear as they are—resting, watching, occupying space and going about their ordinary business of daily life alongside the person who feeds and cares for them.

The artist cares for a wide range of animals and regularly takes in rescues, and the series reflects the full range of those relationships. Some of the animals have lived with her for years. Others came to her through circumstance—birds fallen from nests, kittens abandoned without their mother and creatures that needed somewhere to go. The paintings hold both kinds of relationships without distinguishing between them, treating each animal as an individual presence worth sustained attention.

At the heart of the series is an interest in the gaze as a reciprocal experience. The artist is drawn to the moment when an animal looks back, when the direction of attention between person and animal becomes mutual and neither party is simply the observer. This quality of looking and being looked at runs through the entire body of work, shaping how each painting is composed and how long it takes to make.

Fragments of Living Together sits within the tradition of observational oil portraiture while extending it toward the unglamorous, everyday intimacy of living alongside animals. The series is built around what the artist calls the domestic gaze, a mode of attention shaped by familiarity, care and daily proximity rather than distance or spectacle. It asks what sustained attention to the creatures we share our lives with actually looks like when it is painted slowly, from the inside out.