Colleen Kiely
And the Days Go By (#5) (2021), Gouache, watercolor, and graphite on watercolor paper, 30” x 22”
This Must Be the Place
I make paintings that are composite portraits of fictional women in varying states of visibility. They gaze directly at the viewer or outside the frame, acknowledging the external world. Contrasting interior and persona, I synthesize imagination, found images, and art historical sources to explore vulnerability and the fluidity of time. I focus on creating presence, not likeness, playing with and against the conventions of the portrait genre in western art history.
The paintings are process-driven, juxtaposing gestural figuration and geometric abstraction against fields of color. I revel in the viscosity and flexibility of oil paint and the flow of water-based paints as their different material properties facilitate transformation.
I see paintings as living things, as embodied beings. Paintings have skins, just like we do. They present their face to the world and have an interior life, just like we do. That is why making paintings is so compelling to me – they are the physical embodiment of our interior life and a form of communication between separate bodies and minds. I work to create an experience of presence and empathy between the viewer and the painting.
This Is Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be
This is Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be presents Victoria, an imaginative portrait painting from the present, with paintings and drawings from my earlier Dogs with Hats series.
Though separated by years, the focus remains the same – vulnerability, the circularity of time, and the nature of how and what we see. Clothing and accessories mark the division of public and private space, and act as ornamentation, protection, and/or concealment. Enlarged eyes link to my class roots - Margaret Keane prints of big-eyed kids - and contemporary, exaggerated notions of beauty in western culture.
My works are process-driven. I synthesize sources from art history, popular culture and imagination, transforming them through color, mark-making, and varied paint viscosities.
While the dogs carry memento mori traditions on their heads, Victoria is a fictional character rooted in contemporary portraiture practices. Together, they form a continuum between past and present, personally and culturally. The exhibition title is a line from Laurie Anderson’s song Strange Angels * (1989) from my formative years as an artist, and references a time of altered expectations.
