Local artist Cindy Kane opens an exhibit of her work August 2 at the Granary Gallery. This collection has personal significance to her, as she is returning to her hallmark style after a year of exploring a more figurative approach to painting.
That temporary shift — clear to any Kane admirer in last year’s Granary exhibit — was her necessary response to tragedy. “Anyone who has lost a child sees the world permanently through a different lens,” she says. “So of course the art manifests in ways that are different, but the same. I needed things to look different, I needed a different vernacular to be able to return to my studio. And that way was to look at myself as a child. I still have the same kind of visual vocabulary I always did, I still work with the same ingredients, but I experience the process differently.”
Perhaps the perfect metaphor for this transition is “Breathe,” a mound of flowers crowned with feathers. This was originally “Bow,” inspired by a neighbor who, shortly after Cindy lost her daughter, stood on her porch and acknowledged the intensity of her loss, the gravity of the moment, with a simple bowing gesture. Cindy felt the image worked more successfully on a smaller scale, and painted over the shape of the bow with the flower pile. But there is still a pentimento of the original image in the lower right-hand corner. “So this painting evokes the sense of a bow, but it’s underneath — it’s the secret inside the painting,” she says. The feathers above the image suggest a headdress, without actually being one, another way in which the painting exemplifies the move away from the figurative explorations of the past year. “There is something about it very soothing to me,” she says, “I’ve always worked with a sort of detritus from the natural world — feathers, stones, the solo wings of butterflies. I think they have a kind of confident vulnerability when they’re floating in space.”
The two large paintings which anchor the Granary show do a splendid job of displaying both the breadth and the thematic coherence of her subject matter. “Conference of the Birds” is a colorful frenzy of hundreds of birds in flight; “Focus” is a close-up of a whale’s head from the side, one soulful eye calmly staring at the viewer.
“If I were to title this show,” she says, “I’d call it ‘Heaven and Earth.’ With the birds, my original concept was to have them going in one direction in a migration pattern, but I wanted to interrupt that and make it about the chaos of nature, and the chaos of this global moment — politically and environmentally as well.”
Cindy has incorporated birds into her work for decades to striking effect. The whales — there are several of them at the Granary — are a newer love. She’s been painting them for a few years now, and the results are compelling in both spirit and technique, including the lovely minute splattering effects she gets with toothbrushes. “I think of them almost as sculptures,” she says of the whales. “I enjoy their physicality. They’re so nourishing. Focus is really more about eye contact with the Other. For me, it’s really very much about contact with unknown entities.”
The flowers in “Breathe” appear in other paintings as well, including “Bride.” These are sacred datura, night-bloomers Cindy encountered as a member of the trail crew for the Park Service at the Grand Canyon. (They contain a hallucinogen, which people have not infrequently overdosed on.) Like most objects she works with, the attraction is not simply visual; the blossoms have meaning. “The sacred datura is just so mysterious. It has the aspect of a black hole, which I’m definitely capitalizing on, sucking you in.” She often paints them overlapping each other, which creates a lacy solidity without depicting a specific form. “I use them to suggest movement or stability when they’re framed in that way, as a sort of infrastructure to build on. That’s just one of the ingredients that I use, like I use birds to imply chaos or energy or direction.”
Cindy’s work has always been characterized by an interweaving of movement, meaning, texture, and color. The intersection of these elements has shifted over the years, but all of them are elemental to her artistry. Even the cheeriest images have a soulful depth; even the most somber contain powerful interplays of hue or light.
“Last year’s work was very much about loss,” Cindy says, as a final consideration of the new exhibit. “It was full of embracing and holding on. This year’s transition is about the ebullience in life, the ecstatic joy in just living.” This shines through in all the pieces, including “Sky Bouquet” — “a floating offering to the sky,” and “The Call,” a Cetacean version of Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” celebrating one’s untamable identity.
Cindy also has smaller paintings, often resonant with the larger ones. All her work can be found on Instagram (cindy kane mv) and her website (cindy kane.art) but it’s most glorious in real life, so move heaven and earth to get to the Granary Gallery Friday August 2, from 4 to 6 pm for her opening. The exhibit will be up through August 13.
