kirstin ilse
Boston, Massachusetts
Contemporary fine artist concentrating in painting with protein dye on silk and mixed media.
MessageBorn and raised an artist, Kirstin Ilse attended all the great universities and academies as only an autodidact would. Hand pulling prints; tightening strings of tensegrity; philosophy; drafting tables; famous artists; painting; textiles and sewing; -all basic training growing up. It was a fluke, somebody tipped her off one day the Harvard stock room was “dumping silk dyes and supplies cheap” after a class had been cancelled. It took years to master painting on silk, but it only took a moment to get hooked on the luminosity and tonal dimensionality it produces. Kirstin Ilse has painted fire on silk for over thirty-five years.
Statement
Painting fire as a metaphor, I work to the limits of the medium exploring thematic meditations on subjects ranging from current events to broader philosophical problems and human struggles such as love, loss, duty and society. The graphic control of a drawn glue line is up against the chemistry and physics of dye in an organic material. A place of balance between chaos and control is both the nature of the medium, and deeply the story of the pictures I make. Dye is painted in wet-in-wet working over an area as many as twenty times to move and pull a color into another color and leave them sitting at various heights in the weave of the substrate silk. Labor as evidence to the theme, I hope to give my audience an object of ponderance with which to as easily greet in the morning as to rest the eyes on and follow it around in the course of making a decision. The layered, organic nature of the medium is built around a devotion to and exploration of light. The tonal dimensionality keeps the image alive and changing throughout the day in reflection of the light around it. Please feel free to share your mind in response to the titles I choose. These paintings are all in dialogue with current shifts in culture, they would not exist without the eye of the beholder and the way of the people who want to take part in what we humans decide to make of ourselves.
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