Lydia M Kinney
Greenfield, Massachusetts
Website
www.lydiamkinney.com
Social Media
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
Fundamentally: nonobjective acrylic paintings on canvas. A little deeper: structured explorations of depth and surface.
A continuum of problem solving built around a visually obscured portal. Building luminosity backwards and inside out.
Process driven images that I don't have a firm idea about until they are finished.
Answers to questions I lack words for. Alternatives to language. Alternatives to self-explanation. Social stand ins. Paintings as hard conversations.
It is relieving to describe my work with the understanding that abstract representation is not a 1-to-1 relationship: a painting does not have to express a particular idea but can in a diaristic way trace the development of ideas and sentiments. The viewer cannot, I hope, look at a painting and unwind one represented feeling from it.
What inspires you?
There is a helpful formula that many artists have for a work/life balance that I never nailed down, wherein they do The Survival Things, The Art Things, and the Third Thing to nourish and inspire them. I do not have a third thing. I get joy out of cooking. I listen to a range of podcasts, try to read some combination of fiction and nonfiction, but there are not a lot of hard boundaries between the necessary, the creative, and the inspiring. My practice is just integrated into, and central to my life. I’m lucky to have a self-sustaining process. I am moved by color: other creative uses of it, natural occurrences, and incidental combinations. There’s a world of Little Things that make it into paintings, but I don’t bring them with me intentionally, so much as I connect back to them as the work progresses.
Can you speak about your process?
I can speak about the process endlessly! A painting starts with a toned ground, or something to disrupt the surface, some iteration of form or shape, something to play off that initial shape, and then a wide variation of full surface layering, masked off painted areas, heavy sanding, light staining, and refinement of form and surface until I find a painting just slightly off balance from total visual harmony.
I try to keep the incidental brush stroke out of my work. When I do use a brush, it is often a drawn gesture, sometimes isolating or inverting the gesture into a secondary form in the work. There are many artifacts of process that I want to push, or keep visible, but for neurotic reasons totally specific to my taste in my work, the brush stroke doesn’t make the list. I love the visibility of manual process in masking and sectioning off work; that layer by layer, a shape will change slightly. I cannot see perfectly through the masking tape I prefer, so finding the contour beneath the tape introduces some very human and very moving guesswork. The obstacle turns to provide an animated element to the work.
I work, usually, on several pieces at a time, often developing A Favorite. Often to start a piece I seed it with an element from a recently finished–or frustratingly unresolved–painting, to see where else I can push that element. Currently I have a very simple mid-size painting that I anticipate repeating the base composition of on another canvas, so that I can explore the multiple possibilities of palette, form, etc. the root and drive of the process is exhausting all possibilities.
My painting process is about accepting loss, change, visibility (vulnerability), and unpredictability. The process is extremely controlled– my frequent use of masking is hardly conventional painting. But I don't know where the painting is going to land when finished. Painting is a method of scaling down the things I’m struggling with to see more radical, abstract solutions.
How did you become interested in art?
I’m lucky to have an innate interest in art, as in, I don’t remember not making art as a kid. I was around art, my mom is an artist, my brother is an artist, my dad and his family ran a business making museum display materials, so art museums have been a constant throughout my life. I have this immense but sometimes sideways privilege to access art as a constant.
I think it personally solidified for me as a teenager, who really yearned for affirmation through time with other people, to have something that was challenging, rewarding, and engaging to do alone. Not just alone, but crucially, independently.
I don’t consider myself particularly talented, and my relationship with my work has a lot more to do with a dedication of time and effort than it does having a mystic capacity for conjuring images. It is a unique, beautiful, and precarious time to be A Painter working in this visual language. I wonder where else I would have found myself all the time; if my obligations had been more familial, domestic, industrial, et cetera. Often in the studio I listen to some contemporary news, but lately I lean towards an interest in early world history and anthropology. It is not because I know much about it, but because I’m fascinated both by the opportunities (and faults, and terrors), of living in a very singular time, and maintaining a radical imagination of a better world.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, books, or quotes?
I do have favorites, and the attention span of a goldfish, and I would hate to look back on a list that I don’t recognize.
There is an idea that I’ve mulled over, and I know it relates to painting and art as an institution, and a changing relationship with The Museum. I know the idea is in my work—on a cellular level that is not totally visible or connected yet. This isn’t a quote, because it’s a concept reiterated from one author by another: The prologue to In The Dream House has stayed with me since I read it last year. Machado opens with the concept of archival silence and archival violence, read from Saidiya Hartman (whom I’ve not read, yet) that the selection and manipulation of fact, and resurrection of story, are means to empower and weaponize narrative. Her experience and memoir are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I hesitate to cite such a big concept with a lot to chew on because it comes from such a well crafted but topically challenging book. But it inspires a curiosity of omitted, neglected, or silenced histories.
What advice do you have for younger artists?
It’s worth the time it will take. I remember feeling so assured by the work I made when I got my bachelor’s. It was hard to see at the time that while I had a fine portfolio, that time in academia was meant for building a sustainable practice and my own growth. The work gets better as you continue to make it. Recognition takes time. Talk to people. Talk to other artists. The isolated studio practice is a myth. I used to be so frustrated that I couldn’t have a finished painting outbox and a check inbox. Now I can feel the value of engaging with fellow artists, curators, collectors, et cetera. It feeds the work!
