Isabella Kirkland American, b. 1954
Nature of Painting I, 2025
oil and alkyd on polyester over panel
36 x 48 in
91.4 x 121.9 cm
91.4 x 121.9 cm
Nature of Painting 1 and 2: These two paintings have been likened to samplers – works once stitched by young women to display sewing skill and refinement. They may also...
Nature of Painting 1 and 2:
These two paintings have been likened to samplers – works once stitched by young women to display sewing skill and refinement. They may also be seen as memory palaces or oblique self-portraits. While their imagery is drawn from the natural world, each canvas functions as a meditation on illusion: how to render paint into a believable image. Many of the individual elements operate as deliberate quotes from the still life masters whose work I have studied. Others are derived from my own photographs, gathered during travels undertaken while researching species for other projects. The paintings weave together an inherited visual language and firsthand observation. The backgrounds articulate a literal and symbolic interconnectedness—linking organisms across ecosystems and artists across time. The weevils that crawl over both paintings, including one caught and observed in New Guinea, are a gentle reminder of evolution’s capacity to adapt and repurpose successful forms from the past in the continual production of the new.
These two paintings have been likened to samplers – works once stitched by young women to display sewing skill and refinement. They may also be seen as memory palaces or oblique self-portraits. While their imagery is drawn from the natural world, each canvas functions as a meditation on illusion: how to render paint into a believable image. Many of the individual elements operate as deliberate quotes from the still life masters whose work I have studied. Others are derived from my own photographs, gathered during travels undertaken while researching species for other projects. The paintings weave together an inherited visual language and firsthand observation. The backgrounds articulate a literal and symbolic interconnectedness—linking organisms across ecosystems and artists across time. The weevils that crawl over both paintings, including one caught and observed in New Guinea, are a gentle reminder of evolution’s capacity to adapt and repurpose successful forms from the past in the continual production of the new.
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