A luminescent vision on canvas
Published 11:00 am Tuesday, October 12, 2004
A self-described “country girl,” Claudia McKinstry goes to town for Bainbridge Arts and Crafts fall group show “Bright Lights, Big City,” featuring work by 10 artists on a metropolitan theme.
McKinstry turns her hand to cityscape, although this island artist is deservedly renowned for her oil paintings of flowers and vegetables.
“I’m pretty much a country girl,” McKinstry said. “I paint everything, but I get more involved in painting organic, botanical subjects.”
A visit to the artist’s workplace, a north Bainbridge space overlooking Puget Sound, is a step into the timeless tranquility of a country studio.
Easels with half-finished paintings drenched by skylights are next to tables holding paper palettes, each waxy sheet daubed with the shades of green oil paint that build McKinstry’s layered imagery.
The green daubs echo the foliage of overlapping leafy shrubs framed by an open door.
Four canvases show oversize pumpkin vines with fluted, orange blooms.
The project, destined for an oncology hospital in Houston, Texas, has been completed in just four months, much faster than McKinstry likes to work.
To get the lustrous surfaces, McKinstry must build layers, painstakingly. She’s after the effects of light – reflected from surfaces and delineating form, the translucency of foliage in sun.
The result of that concentration is discernible in the whorl of an unfolding pumpkin flower or the sunlit shaft of vine emerging from deep shadow.
“The paintings I do are layers and layers so they get a depth,” McKinstry said. “It’s totally all about the light with me. It’s all about the light.”
The artist who loves tranquility and light today can look back on a formal art education in the late 1960s, reflective of those turbulent times.
“The first day I went to UW, somebody had blown up the ROTC building, (and) I have distinct memories of the National Guard coming out of buses,” she said. “People (were) running through the art building smashing windows. It was a crazy time.”
When McKinstry was in art school, abstract expressionism was the dominant mode at the UW – under the influence of adherents who filled university art departments when those teaching positions were first created nationwide in the early 1950s, and who then held them tenaciously for decades.
McKinstry says she didn’t quite go along with that school, because her first love was the chromatic palette.
“I love color, and I never could fall in with the ‘dead’ colors (of expressionism)…You have to get to a point where you’re going to do what you’re going to do,” she said.
Today, McKinstry is still her own person. Not into “the coffeehouse culture” of artistic fellowship and disinterested in input from other artists, she’d rather reserve her energy for following the thread of her own work.
But she does savor having private students who work in a caboose next to her studio, and she taught at Strawberry Hill alternative school for eight years.
“I’ve always loved mentoring kids,” she said, “but when I was done (with Strawberry Hill), it was, you know, ‘yahoo.’”
It was after that teaching junket that she had a creative surge she calls “a burst of flowers” that lasted a decade.
Then, partly to escape the “flower-lady” pigeon hole, McKinstry turned briefly to painting cityscapes like the piece at BAC.
But her first concern remained the light. When she traveled into Seattle to paint, she caught a late-afternoon ferry to experience the horizontal light of Northwest autumn.
“It doesn’t really matter what you paint, if you talk to artists, about 99 percent of them say it’s about the light,” McKinstry said. “I will never get tired of the way objects interpret light.”
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The bustle of the city comes to Bainbridge with the “Bright Lights, Big City” exhibition Oct. 2 to Nov. 14 at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts. Artists Kate Dwyer, Bill Elston, Kathe Fraga, Todd Kowalski, Chris Lehwalder, Claudia McKinstry, Kim Murton, Jim Nilsen, Jessica Osborn and Stephen Rock show cityscapes in a variety of media.
Also on display are Megan Drew’s jazz paintings, “Jazz in the City.” Drew’s close-up look at the instruments, dramatic perspective drawing and rich color put viewers in the middle of le jazz hot. Call 842-3132 for more information.
