Brave
This series of paintings began with my father’s death in 2018. He was my champion, my teacher, my biggest cheerleader. It’s been the most profound loss of my life. I had a solo show scheduled only 4 months after his death. In the final two paintings I made for that show, the color completely drained out of the work as my enthusiasm for living abandoned me.
As I thought about what comes after life, I toyed with cliché images of heaven. This informed a new arrangement where I use negative space as the unknown. It took years before I got comfortable with so much negative space. Now I can’t make work that doesn’t allow the eye to pause and consider before moving on. To balance the negative space, it’s imperative the positive elements are well chosen. I attend these areas with fastidious detail while allowing softer, billowy forms to calmly float. I’ve been employing white as a color, creating shapes that contribute to the composition, rather than relegated only to highlights.
I’ve been dark and lonely since Dad died. I escape every once in a while and enjoy the light but I always wind up back in that hole. I’m, what’s a stronger word for ‘sick of it’ or ‘exhausted from it’ or just plain hopeless it’ll ever change? Wretched despair? Despondent anguish? Empty and desolate? Abject gloom? Inconsolable futility? If I’m compelled to say anything nice about myself it’s this: Finding the resolve to keep climbing out of the canyon of darkness all while attempting to make a noticeable difference in my community is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Color is slowly returning, illustrating inestimable courage when all other lights have been extinguished.
The paintings are abstractions of my mental recordings. Visual expressions of thoughts about life, death and what comes after death. “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns puzzles the will.” -Hamlet. It’s the best I can do to provide an external illustration of what my mind has been through in the past few years. The endless haunting stories that never go away. The quest to come to peace with my inescapable history. I am fully aware these displays are, like all other attempts to answer the unanswerable, minimal and incomplete. They are, however, true.
–Kim Fay
The reception will take place on October 3rd from 5pm-9pm