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Deep inside Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum lies The Black Hours, a rare 15th-century illuminated manuscript. Like many prayer books from the Middle Ages, it guided Christian households through daily devotions. But what sets The Black Hours apart—its carbon-darkened vellum pages, which make the silver and gold lettering and intricate religious illustrations gleam—also makes it incredibly fragile.

“It’s like a ghost story,” says artist Lily Stockman, whose own abstract paintings radiate a luminous quality. She’s never seen The Black Hours in person (few have—it was last displayed in 1997), but years ago, she heard about this 500-year-old book, now carefully preserved in an acid-free box. “There’s something romantic about that,” she muses.

Stockman, ever the polymath, began studying other medieval books of hours from her sunlit studio in Glassell Park, the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood she shares with her husband and three young children. She noticed a connection between these ancient manuscripts and her own work.

“I love the composition of the pages—the lush decorative borders framing a painted scene inside,” says Stockman, 43. “My paintings work the same way: the border acts as a container for the living, floating forms within.” She was also drawn to how these books carved out moments for quiet reflection throughout the day.

This exploration inspired her latest series, Book of Hours, which will debut in September at Charles Moffett’s new Tribeca gallery. The dozen oil paintings share traits with her earlier work—vibrant borders framing simplified, nature-inspired shapes that hint at seeds, dahlias, and meadows. These forms trace back to her childhood on a New Jersey hay farm, where she grew up the eldest of four sisters and inherited her mother’s love of gardening. The new series continues this theme, with nods to rhubarb, rippling ponds, and the Maine coast.

But Stockman has set herself a fresh challenge: leaving the marks of her process visible. “I want the labor, the decisions, even the mistakes to show,” she says. Less polished, more like life itself. In Ipswich, one of her largest new works at seven feet tall, the pulsating red, pink, and white border reveals raw brushstrokes. “A few years ago, I might have blended all that away,” she admits.

Though her paintings lean geometric, they carry a handmade warmth best appreciated in person. “Standing in front of them, you can’t miss the slight wobble in the lines—like with an Agnes Martin,” says Charlie Moffett, who gave Stockman her first solo show when he opened his gallery in 2018. He’s been a devoted supporter since they met through friends over a decade ago. “I remember calling her when I was still at Sotheby’s, saying I wouldn’t open the gallery unless she agreed to be my first show.”

Since then, Stockman’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, from Gagosian in Athens to Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche in Paris. “She could’ve stayed comfortable—her work was selling,” Moffett notes. “But she pushed herself, experimenting with new palettes and shapes. That’s not easy for a successful young artist.”

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Let me know if you’d like any further refinements!2024. Ed Mumford. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.

From an early age, Lily Stockman was captivated by both nature and art. “In elementary school, I doodled horses all over my multiplication tables, and in high school, I got in trouble for carving drawings into the grass with the lawnmower,” she recalls. During her undergraduate years at Harvard, where she studied art, she found inspiration in class trips to the Fogg Museum. “The curators would pull out Renaissance altarpieces we’d only seen in slides,” she says. Though her style is contemporary, it’s rich with echoes of historical art.

Her work also carries deeply personal undercurrents—even when the full story isn’t immediately clear to her. Take Ipswich, a painting with undulating rings of blue and indigo inside a red border. Stockman remembers a professor who lived in a Cape Cod-style house near the Boston marshes. “We’d have long dinners there, watching the tide roll in and submerge the marsh grass, then recede, leaving behind velvety cowlicks in the mud,” she says. Later, she stumbled upon old black-and-white photos of grass being cut and stacked for cattle—”like New England’s answer to Monet’s haystacks.” Only then did she connect the painting to her childhood on a hay farm. “These shapes often emerge from something buried in my subconscious. It’s only when they take shape on the canvas that I understand them.”

But it’s not just the forms that make Stockman’s paintings so striking—it’s the color, vibrant and harmonious in a way that’s both exhilarating and calming. “She’s an extraordinary colorist,” says curator Helen Molesworth, who will feature Stockman in an upcoming David Zwirner exhibition on a new generation of California light and space artists. Before graduate school at NYU, Stockman spent a year in Jaipur studying Mughal miniature painting, an experience that deepened her reverence for color—from the raw materials, like lapis lazuli ground into ultramarine, to the power of certain combinations.

Lily Stockman, Love Letter, 2024. Ed Mumford. Courtesy of Charles Moffett.

Of all her passions, gardening may be the most formative—and the best metaphor for her work. “It’s my native language for marking time,” she says. When we spoke in early summer, she noted the shifting colors and scents in her garden: the irises fading, the roses newly in bloom. Her mother introduced her to color theory through flowers, taking her as a child to one of the few US gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll. Jekyll treated plants like paint, arranging soft blues and lavenders at the garden’s edge to dissolve the boundary between land and sky.

Yet gardens, like life, are fragile. “A rose petal can be exquisite, but it can also bruise,” Molesworth observes. “Stockman grapples with that duality—in art as much as in life.” That’s why her embrace of imperfection in her new work feels so exhilarating. The wobble of a line, the blemish on a petal, the flaking edge of a book page—these are the marks of something alive, something that shines through use.