Artist in Focus: Kaylie Abela |
Ugallery is proud to feature Kaylie Abela in our inaugural edition of the Artist in Focus series. Twice a month, we will highlight some of the most intriguing artists from our gallery. We asked Kaylie's to be our first featured artist because of her exceptionally unique methods of creating art. Enjoy Kaylie's story and stay posted to the Ugallery blog for more on Ugallery's artists and community. What’s your earliest art memory? My mother would entertain me for hours with coloring books if she needed uninterrupted time around the house. I remember sitting at the breakfast bar with a coloring book and crayons all around me. My favorite color was “macaroni and cheese,†just because of its name. Besides that color, I was a little girl who liked pink, not purple. (Those colors divided our cafeteria tables in elementary school.) What keeps you up at night? Everything! If I’m between pieces, I will visually assemble my next canvas in my head. I think of color combinations, whether or not I’m low on supplies, and most importantly: where the floor may be most level in my studio. Not everything is art-related. I work in a high-end shoe and accessories boutique in Beacon Hill and I lay awake or dream about that very often. I am the type of person who likes everything done in order, on time, and flawlessly. It can be beneficial for obvious reasons but also disadvantageous because it is impossible to achieve perfection, and as a consequence I worry a lot. Five (2009) In some of your pieces, you use a particularly interesting method to apply paint. Can you tell us a little more about the process? In this series of paintings, ice is left to melt over beads of acrylic paint on the level surface of a carefully prepared canvas. I mix a primer that allows the surface to absorb enough paint to stain while simultaneously repelling the water enough for it to pool and evaporate. The results are mysterious marks of color that interact with one another spontaneously.How did you come up with the idea? The idea to work with ice came about while flipping through books on Andy Goldsworthy, oddly enough. I needed to make a presentation on his Earth art and stumbled across a photograph of what looked like mud stains on huge sheets of paper. The caption said only “Melted snowballs†and provided no further information, nor was I able to find that photo (or anything like it) elsewhere. At first, I tinted ice cubes and melted them. But then I found that I preferred the texture that results from melting regular ice cubes on raw paint. What are these works inspired by? I’ve always been interested in chance, possibility, inevitability, probability and randomness. Lately these interests have directed me to the categories of mathematics and physics. I am still working on describing these relationships more clearly in my paintings. My process requires me to surrender a great deal of control over imagery and that is how I exercise my interest in chance and inevitability through painting. What do you see as more compelling/important in art today - the concept or the beauty/aesthetics? A really powerful piece of visual art will involve a balance of aesthetics and conceptual validity, but I believe in aesthetics really strongly because that’s what captivates a viewer first. An interested viewer can then use visual cues or read about the work to discover more about the artist’s intent or concept. In this case, the “aesthetic†doesn’t even necessarily have to be beautiful, just alluring in some way. What are you working on now? I’m working on canvases that are much bigger than the 6 x 6 canvases I typically sell on UGallery. These pieces are 48 x 60. I enjoy the process of making these because I build my own canvas stretchers and stretch them myself, which give them a heavier, more hand-made quality. I really like 2D artwork to function both as an object and an image and that’s why I prefer to work on canvas (many people ask me why I don’t just use paper.) Wires in the Air 2 (2007) I know you live in Boston, what’s the art scene like there? Where do you go to look at art? Boston and its surrounding towns are very active in the arts community, but my favorite place to go is to the galleries on Harrison Avenue in the South End. Carroll and Sons, Walker Contemporary, Samson Projects, Steven Zevitas and Howard Yezerski are among my favorite spaces to visit. The SoWa (South of Washington Street) Artists Guild also puts together an exciting First Friday when the artists open their studios, which are in a building in the same area as the galleries I just mentioned. My MassArt student ID gives me free admission to museums like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum so naturally I spend a good amount of time in those places, too. The possibilities to view art in Boston are endless. What advice would you offer to other emerging artists? Pursuing your art career is hard work. The age-old fantasy of being “discovered†is over due to advancement of technology and how easy it has become to access and receive information. Artists can and need to be very organized. As an artist, you need to find or make your own opportunities, be persistent, and be active within your local art community. It is up to us to make it happen, and rejection is just part of the process! |
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Interview with UGallery.com
The gallery that sells my work, UGallery has been kind enough to ask me to interview with them! The feature went up today and I hope you enjoy it. This is the link, and here is the text:
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