|
Connie
Kirk
En Couleur, Signature Member
|
Rosie's Cookhouse
12" x 9" oil
sold
|
|
Connie Kirk
is a talented Marin County artist who’s lush canvases follow in the footsteps
of prior colorists such as the Society of Six. She is a graduate
of the Rhode Island School of Design and Roger Williams University. She owns her
own highly successful Design Studio in San Anselmo, California.
Connie is a Signature Member of En
Couleur, a
group of California colorists.
|
Crockett Afternoon
13" x13" oil
$1000
|
Fruit Stand at the Palace
12" x 12" oil
$1000
|
|
"Kirk's
influences are many yet she remains original. Courageous in her willingness to
go beyond the prescribed boundaries, she borrows what works and discards what
doesn't. This is a painter who is rarely satisfied because she is always
stretching...bored with the status quo, Kirk will continue to surprise us and
push the limits."
Sarah Beserra, the Plein Air Scene, May 2000.
|
Main Street I
sold
|
Main Street II
sold
|
|
Connie
Kirk's lush landscapes often approach the abstract where vibrant planes of
vibrant color meet in a joyous play of light and texture. "She is able to
achieve colors that one rarely sees in oil painting by working and reworking
the canvas, color over color, layer over layer, until the finished product becomes
a tapestry of texture and pigment."
|
Roses in Chinese Bowl
24" x 24" oil
sold
|
|
CONNIE KIRK
William Lester Gallery – One
Person Show
October 2005
By Sarah
Beserra
Connie
Kirk’s painting are about passion, unbounded expression, color and, most of
all, paint. Equally facile with landscape as she is with figures and still
lifes, Kirk’s work is fresh and new. She is both a plein air painter and a
studio painter, but her object is not to capture a scene as it appears to the
naked eye, but rather to create a painting that expresses how she feels about
that place or thing. She is an “expressionist” rather than an impressionist.
Her passion comes from the inside and explodes onto the canvas. How does the
paint interact with the canvas? How can I express how I feel about this
scene? These are her concerns.
Like Matisse
and the Fauves, Kirk has moved beyond the traditional plein air/impressionist
movement to create something new. It’s all about the paint, the texture, and
the design.You see hints of Diebenkorn and Bischoff and Terry St. John, all
influences on her work. She lists Wolf Kahn, Jerrold Turner, Dennis Hare as
mentors and the Society of Six as an influence. Like St. John, and Bischoff,
she teeters on the edge of abstraction, but never succumbs to it. Perhaps she
will go there one day. She is constantly evolving. To remain static would be
death to her. That is what makes her work so exciting. She continually
surprises us.
Her
figurative works are more about design than capturing the likeness of a
person. Like Degas and his ballet dancers, she uses unusual cropping, and
dramatic angles, lopping off the side of a head here, a foot there. This adds
immediacy and tension. Her figures are not portraits, and rarely can you
distinguish features in a face. But if you know her models, you can recognize
them in her paintings through a stance or a favorite shirt or hat.
On the most
somber days, she sees color and adds it to her paintings. In “Sailing the
Sea” she blends the sea with the sky, achieving a neutral background to
showcase a small boat. The bright splash of blue brings the painting alive.
There is tension in the painting. Has the sail been taken down due to bad
weather? Is that a shark lurking in the foreground or is that simply a swath
of Kirk’s palette knife? Yet, it’s a beautiful picture which begs you to come
back to it. In “Grazing”, it is not so much about the cows as the paint. She
plays with the paint with abandon and goes wild with color. The cows are
incidental and disappear into a sea of dense oil paint.
She rarely
relies on the actual color of a place if she can make a more interesting
painting. Her still lifes are reminiscent of S.C. Yuan, sensuous stokes of
thick luscious paint, with an immediacy to them. “Roses in a Chinese Bowl”
shows Kirk’s mastery of color. Here, she evades the easy solution of setting
the pale pink roses against a contrasting background for a more subtle
approach. The flowers and the wall behind them are the same colors. It is the
sculptural quality of the paint that allows the eye to distinguish the
flowers. Again, Kirk takes a chance here and hits the mark.
Kirk
continues to grow as a painter and will continue to grow, because that’s her
nature. Modernist, colorist, Expressionist, she is all of these. But it is
her risk taking that continues to define her work, and invites the viewer to
come back for more.
|
Fruit of Plenty
16" x 30" oil
sold
|
Cows on Pink Hillside
6" x 7" oil on panel
sold
|
Beach Blanket Love
10" x 8" oil
sold
|
|
|
![[E-MAIL]](../../images/mail-to.gif){kind=small}
