09/11/2022
Golden Hour by on
So in love with this exceptional artist 💕
On until November 12th with all works sold 💫
Mckinney expands and deepens her exploration into female subjecthood. The show’s title, Golden Hour reflects the the soft, resonant light of a particular time of day that often inspires self-reflection and signals the beginning of a period of relaxation. Emotionally as much as physically, Golden Hour marks the transition from the external world of work and play to the internal world of rest and solitude.
Mckinney’s work offer a radical possibility: a space in which a person is utterly free to be themselves, an existence circumscribed in aesthetic terms of their own devising. Whether sleeping or smoking, sitting or reclining, these figures inhabit a sense of freedom and raw emotion one feels in the safety of their own space.
With a photographer’s precise technical sensitivity to contrast and color, Mckinney starts every painting with a layer of black gesso from which a portrait evolves, likening the work to the process of developing a photograph in a darkroom. As she has said, “I can’t undo that photographic training—it’s embedded in how I begin a painting. First, I paint the canvas with a black ground, and that black ground serves almost like the camera’s viewfinder. It allows me to build the image.” Photographs, often found on websites or social media, are the source material for her images, which she deploys to parse the nuances of gesture, color, and shape––a contemporary reimagining of the tradition of painting from live models.
