| How Things Feel |
| Big issues – life death, the meaning of things, the fleeting past, memories disappearing, wondering if they were ever really real. Menopause, womanhood –the overwhelming biology of womanhood –. self-destructive tendencies, lost in your head daydreaming and painting issues, plus tripping, falling, humiliation, being abandoned, making a scene… |
| To really know the past, you have to know how it feels. To feel it is a physical thing of being there. One can know something of the feeling of the past through contact with older people and a little through objects and possibly also through paintings, but maybe not. |
| Encountering people younger than myself who didn’t experience the past I lived through (the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the otts), interpreting hollowed out outlines of events, realizing that I didn’t know the feeling of time before I lived, except I was close to my grandmother. She carried the feeling of the past that I could perceive through her. I know a little bit what it felt like to live through the great depression. I wish she was still here because there is more I would have liked to ask her about. Knowing the past is a feeling that we have because we were there. |
| Watching everything about the small individual past disappearing, an inconsequential something specific gone without a trace because there is no one left to remember it. No one remarked about it at the time. Bonds that connected it to the greater web of life unused disappear, banal neglect. |
| Ideas of real and fake (illusion and the physical) is not solely about the ontology of painting. In my work this concept is both physical and psychological. Similar to how the word lean and be a thing physically leaning or can mean something less physical, like something being thin or not quite enough. Real and fake is about the physicality of the paintings, and also about hiding, insecurity, lying, pretending, masking, recreating VS. natural unmitigated beliefs, observations, feelings, and also the pretense of natural… |
| An aside, just thinking about conversations around the touch of an artist – how it’s supposed to be recognizable – Is a brush mark unique to each artist like a fingerprint? Or something that can be masked? Ie: If I was this, I would paint like this, or that! For me it has specificity. Could it be the less personal, the less universal – the more universal, the less interesting (ie: bromides, platitudes…) |
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| More than other things, a brush mark is the life force. Standing in front of a painting is standing where the artist once stood. What is the attitude of the brush mark? Is it something an artist can’t hide? Intentional with attention or slap-dash and half distracted? |
| The artist can create brush marks out of different attitudes, some real, some put-on acting, some pretending and feeling. |
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| Artist Statement 2021 – I wrote this early in the year |
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| Recombining elements in the studio plus blinding flashes of inspiration plus thoughts (and prayers), hopes and fears. |
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| The art of the severely bullied. I’m never sure for long. I always doubt myself, reverse myself, feel ashamed, go forward anyways, exxing out the doubts in my mind. |
| Bill Maher said the problem with America is there are too many artists – how dare he and what a joke! – Conversely, there are too many people who speculate on the necessities for life. We prey on each other. |
| It’s easy for me to forget after so many years how there was never any choice for me. I wanted to find something that wouldn’t hurt anybody. Art seemed the most harmless and most life affirming thing I could think of – a labile dance through the air. |
| When I had my psychic (psychotic) break, I became unable to see the value in just being a person living, working and childbearing. I wanted to mark time some other way, make manifest arabesques of energy in the air – euphoric – raw substance that has friction, picks up magnets and grit, furry imagined feeling. |
| I don’t think art should always be forward-facing to the audience. Sometimes it should be seemingly unpresentable. |
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| I work forward rather than start with an overarching idea and then set about to illustrate it. I believe in following the work, following my nose. |
| I’m trying to get free. I’m trying to manifest what I see in my mind’s eye. I’m trying too keep from influencing my own work, let come what naturally arrives so it’s the real and natural thing – distrustful of whether our consciousness is actually natural (only half true). |
| Death wish. Translation? Obliteration. Transcendence, falling, the sublime etc., evaporation… |
| Kristin makes work intuitively, choosing what she’s attracted to. She eschews decoration and finds most painting to be merely decoration, which is repulsive. |
| Are you looking for something to look at. |
| Punk – ture Punkture puncture grab something, drag it in |