Welcome to AllArtWorks Featured Artist Series!
1. What other profession is similar to being an artist and why?
That of writing poetry. Poets make up narratives and stories that can be quite visual, and poets have to love what they do, as economic security is not a given with poetry (or the visual arts, music, and dance).
2. What’s the nicest thing you can remember someone said about your work, or an individual piece?
My friend, Jack Miller, editor of Verdad Magazine, said, “Among painters whose work is a metaphor for the experience of looking at something, like a landscape, (most of the painters in human history), Kristin is doing difficult and intimate things deftly. I like it when a friend gives me their unvarnished news. I like it that Kristin takes me to her easel, on a particular night, and shares the experience of being Kristin, observing intensely and with a glorious lack of concern for logic or about getting things “right.”
3. What’s one thing you’d like everyone to know about you as an artist?
My first few years of painting were either figurative or abstract (poured paint) and some were very large (7x10’). I began to paint en plein air and the size gradually became smaller, ranging from 38”x38” to small enough to hold in my hand. A few years ago, a friend turned me onto 5x7” aluminum stepflashes, which I’ve been using since then almost exclusively for plein air work. In 2015, I had the great fortune to witness a full lunar eclipse on the coast of Maine, and I’ve painted every full moon since then, wherever I happen to be.
4. What was the last piece of art that you saw that blew you away?
David Hockney’s prints of iPhone drawings at Pace gallery. I was mesmerized by his painterly and layered use of this digital medium with deft mark making, creative modeling, and glorious color. Oh... And, some small paintings of full moons by Lois Dodd... And paintings by Jenna Gribbon.
5. What’s something you haven’t done but you want to do in art/painting?
Visit the MacDonald Observatory in Austin and paint in Marfa, Texas at night.
Delacroix. I love, love his painting, Women of Algiers. He also used Naples Yellow oil paint and wrote about it in his journals, so I tried it and use it too. It’s a full bodied opaque yellow that holds its own when mixed.
*The reason we ask about Delacroix and Ingres is because they were contemporaries with wildly different styles!
