Isabella Kirkland: Nature of Painting
91.4 x 121.9 cm
My practice is about the kinship between science and art. Both disciplines are born from common impulses: to observe with devotion, to compare, to learn through intimacy. At times, such sustained attention leads to a leap of understanding — a new way of seeing that can reshape both the work and the worker.
– Isabella Kirkland
Isabella Kirkland uses the techniques developed by 17th century Dutch still life artists to make paintings that explore the environmental train wreck that is the Anthropocene. Extinct, endangered, recovering or invasive, her meticulous renderings of species are an effort to document and preserve organisms in a moment of rapid climatic and ecological change.
Paintings whose subject matter ranges from succulents in their habitats to trays of preserved butterflies, chrysalis, and collections of seashells, allude to scientific study, the human propensity to collect, the desire to preserve, and the unwitting menace we pose to nature in spite of our best intent. Three monumental paintings celebrate the historical connection between science and art as well the artist's personal experience of teaching herself to paint.
Isabella Kirkland was born in Connecticut and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1970s. Her work is in major museum collections throughout the United States, including the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), St. Louis Museum of Art, The Hood Museum of Art (Hanover, NH), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), Queens Museum (New York), Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY), Toledo Art Museum (OH), Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). She lives on a houseboat on the San Francisco Bay.
