ARTIST PROFILE
The Personal Narrative of Cindy Kane
By Abby Remer
In these times, connection is something to be treasured. We feel a visceral oneness with another sentient being within our bodies when standing before Cindy Kane’s impressive paintings.
The artist, who listens to music while she works, notes that Joni Mitchell’s lyric, “In this time on earth, we perceive one another,” from her song “Stay in Touch,” serves as the conceptual anchor for her current paintings. Kane says, “In the recurring motif of eye contact with whales or birds of prey, I am thinking about moments of recognition of the other. Perceiving another being and contemplating its inner life is what many of these pieces explore.”
Kane works on a large scale and often comes in quite close to her subjects, creating a resonance with their very spirit. In “The Great Horned Owl,” the magnificent avian stares straight at us, unabashed, against a speckled background. Kane meticulously delineates each of its fine feathers, which vary from one part of the bird to another. Its slightly hooded eyes penetrate our hearts, piercing through any veils we might wish to hide behind, creating an intimate moment between us and this great creature.
Kane visually launches us into a relationship with the great orca in “Perceiving” by including an anonymous, silhouetted human head, which could be any of us. While the orca towers over the portrait, there is no ominous sense of danger, despite the animal being known as a “killer whale.” Instead, the two species are communing on an unspoken level.
Kane’s new paintings immediately convey the whales’ grandeur. She never depicts their full bodies, but rather their heads, which, in filling much of the vast underwater environment, evoke the animals’ power. The singular whales in “Presence” and others rush into our space unexpectedly. Hovering vertically within arm’s reach, we are small before their impressive bearing. “I am drawn to iconic shapes and central images, like the Stonehenge towers. A singular whale can have that kind of presence.” Interestingly, orcas are technically not “true” whales. Rather, they are the largest members of the oceanic dolphin family, although they are classified under the toothed whale suborder. Kane started painting these aquatic mammals about 6 years after a whale-watching trip off the coast of Provincetown. “I saw them for the first time, which was a massively impactful experience. I felt very emotional. I wasn’t the only one who had tears in my eyes. I was astonished that the whales are the size of buildings. It took a long time to figure out how to approach them.” Then she resolved, “Their texture and eye contact were how I wanted to experience them with paint.”
Kane has only recently turned to orcas after receiving a commission from a woman who dives with them. “This started a whole new series of orca paintings. I was looking at videos of them. They are very statuesque but almost look like plastic toys. Although they are black and white, when you look at them closely, they have tons of textures from scars and abra-sions, and a lot of discolorations.” The longer we look, the more we notice Kane’s fascinating variations that become abstract constellations of organic shapes and dabs of color.
Kane conveys great tenderness in the mother-baby bond in both “Drink” and “Point,” where the calves and mothers are almost, but not quite, touching. We witness an even more intimate maternal moment in “Milk,”. In “Drink” we see the humpback calf floating below its mother, having just nudged her mammary gland to stimulate feeding. She now squirts out a gallon of toothpaste-textured milk, which sprays into the baby’s mouth. There is a sublime sense of care in this instinctual dance, which ensures the calf’s sustenance.
Kane initially imagines her images in her mind’s eye. She sketches the animal’s overall shape on the canvases, then outlines the significant interior areas. She then creates mesmerizingly complex surfaces using a brush, sponge, pen, or toothbrush to apply her paint. Kane uses opaque backgrounds, which focus our eyes on her subjects, or fills the space with a fine, linear, stitch-like pattern, laying down row after row by hand, that activates the canvas’s surface.
Kane frequently paints over earlier canvases, creating a pentimento effect. “It’s layers upon layers of information and gives them the texture and feeling of old stories. I really like to work on an old infrastructure that has a lot of messaging and images underneath.” Selecting which canvases to reuse, she says, “There’s no prescription. It’s a process of thinking about it very carefully and looking at a painting that’s lingered in my studio for too long. It’s like a breakup. Every painting has a lifespan.”
Speaking again about Joni Mitchell’s “Stay in Touch,” Kane shares, “Later in this song that Joni wrote for her daughter (whom she gave up for adoption but reconnected with later in life), she sings, ‘let the worries hush.’ Sometimes a song lyric can act as a kind of protective mantra, generating a force field of thoughts that pour into the process of painting.”
We see this in “Bell’s Lashes”and “Let the Worries Hush”. The gentle, white marbled por-traits of horses which are actually of the same equine. With their heads caught just so, the composition is soothing and perhaps a metaphor not only for hushing worries but also for a calm meeting of ourselves.
There is a different energy to “Wedding”. We can hear the glorious cacophony of all the different, splendidly hued chirping birds. Kane created this riotous composition by first laying down white, blooming flowers against a black background, then adding the birds. “I wanted it to be joyful,” she says.
This sentiment reflects Kane’s hope that people walk away from her new work with pleasure and curiosity. “I have a history of making social political art, which is still meaningful to me, but I am taking a step away from that in this moment. I am a political junkie and grew up in DC, so it’s part of my background. But I’m looking for ways to calm myself because of everything going on in the world.”
Whether it’s external or internal turmoil, Kane’s glorious new body of work will indeed delight and hush our individual and collective worries.
Cindy Kane shows her work on-Island at the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury. For more information or to see more of her work click: cindykane.art, Instagram: cindykanemv