Kathleen Kane-Murrell
San Diego, CA
It is through art making and art history that I glimpse what it means to be human. Nothing else has ever touched these questions in quite the same way for me.
Message
Atmosphere
My exploration into creating space, light, and color fields on unprimed canvas began intuitively. I was surprised how acrylic pigment behaved when freed from the barrier of a primed canvas. It was much like the watercolor lessons I taught for years to children. On raw canvas, color does not simply sit on the surface. Color soaks, blooms, and diffuses, and becomes infused into the fabric. This absorption is somewhat uncontrollable with an immediacy and unpredictability I found challenging and beautiful. The surface records every decision including hesitation, drips and surprises.
There have been multiple false starts including breaks between the work I created. But I found myself drawn back into the scale and simplicity of this work. I feel certain I have not exhausted what this medium has to offer. There is more to uncover about the tension between control and surrender. This process has taught me to embrace the unexpected—which is something valued in art and life. My dialogue continues.
Moss Series
Moss
I think a lot about time. I try to remember to look closely and slowly, for the moment is fleeting.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things, helped me define this series.
As Gilbert’s protagonist muses…
“As Alma studied Moss Time, she tried not to worry about her own mortal life. She herself was trapped within the limits of Human Time, but there was nothing to be done for it. She would simply have to make the best of the short, mayfly-like existence she had been granted.”
Moss looks like a solid from a certain perspective, but it is composed of the tiniest parts woven together to form the whole of a space. Each part is singular. It changes in light and seasons. Moss is often overlooked, found in unlikely cracks of the sidewalk or crevices of rocks. Light and space changes perspective.
Our world looks quickly at almost everything. This work builds upon slow looking-- the small and overlooked.
Studio Door Natural World
We are in a strange place in our relationship with nature: surrounded by beauty and resilience, yet aware of the profound instability our presence has introduced. I want to create work where familiar elements appear but within a landscape that feels unfamiliar. The images suggest a recognizable natural world, but one that is altered. Cellular shapes expand, patterns repeat and mutate, and organic structures drift into the strange.
Monarch butterflies and bees appear throughout the work as quiet witnesses to endurance and adaptation. Their persistence stands in contrast to the fragility of the systems that support them. This work inhabits that tension.This work aims to create a space where the familiar and the strange coexist: a meditation on resilience, uncertainty, and our shifting place within the living world. Materially, the paintings combine mixed media and acrylic on canvas or panel in a richly dense surface with a floating acrylic layer.
