A Suspension of Disbelief: Lydia Kinney’s Art

Lydia Kinney lives and works in Greenfield, Massachusetts. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014 with a BFA in Painting.

Lydia’s work focuses on spatial abstractions, forming tensions of interior/exterior environments. Subjects include windows and pillars into other planes, disintegrating color fields, formally ambiguous confetti, and plays of texture.

The Artist’s Statement

“My paintings function with haphazard visual structure and a focus on material. The composition is pivoted on stained substrates and poured surfaces. I push the compositions to balance a suspension of disbelief and a tangible acknowledgment of a made object. The dichotomy of drawn and painted treatments takes advantage of the depth and atmosphere implied by wet, amorphous forms and planes.

“Rigid lines and shapes encounter these surfaces, holding up, constraining, destabilizing, and contradicting their preceding natural flow. The dialog of tense boundaries and soft, moving forms establishes its own environment.

“I am compelled by a clumsy and imperfect nature of painting, especially with a relationship to a more perfect, cold language of drawing. The precise and angular nature of many of the forms I work with lend themselves to a technical vernacular. I leave proof of artifice; trusting my hand to waver from perfect lines, and likewise building shapes or planes that are too sharp to read in the proposed physical space. My hand invariably invades the illusion.”

Bistro 63 in Amherst will be hosting a small selection of Lydia’s work this month and July of 2019. She will also be showing at Amherst Town Hall in September. Visit her website by clicking here.