Girl in the Dark

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Katelyn Alain
Girl in the Dark
2017

About the Item

This recent suite of mini-portraits are all painted on Metrocards! The artist's mature, figurative style evokes the mood and techniques of the Old Masters with a Surrealist flair. Each lovely, brooding portrait is framed and ready-to-hang or gift! Alain’s paintings come from an investigation into the internalized space where perception and memory meet. Creating work by examining how the brain has retained the past authenticates the strangeness and inaccuracies of the mind as part of the reality and space we occupy. It also resurrects it to be experienced in a new light. It is a path to observe an alternate unfolding of events and offers a new ontology of personal experience. Taking the way a memory has been distorted and romanticized over time, Alain embraces the idea of psychological discovery and play through paint while using the mind’s exaggerations, simplifications, and abstractions as source material. Statement My latest series of paintings explores water as a metaphor and serves as a visual record of my internalized reactions to current events. In my drive to create paintings that describe my reality as I experience and retain it, I am interested in the exuberance and distortion of the mind and in memory perception. My truth in memory is poetic artifice that often appears mythological if not mystical in significance. The more time passes, the more romanticized and singular a perception becomes where the fluid mind and the passage of time gel the past into ever more solid metaphorical form. Painting serves as an exploration of a new, more accurate internal history. How I retain reality and empathize with humanity provides source material for the contradictions and beauty that exist in a distorted and elevated psychological landscape. My imagined characters occupy these unreal spaces and become conduits to emote a particular feeling or to gaze back and ask questions. My painting practice is fueled by seeking answers to impossible questions. How do I accurately portray the way I internalize and experience the unfolding of life? How do I depict this unique perception in paint? How do I paint what it feels like to exist? To love? To endure pain? How do I articulate the abstractions of the mind or the voids in my memory? The answers lie outside language in that moment of discovering clarity in hindsight and through the distillation of chaos and excessive stimuli that only time can supply. Painting is a meditative act and through the poetics of paint an internalized visual is made external. In that process; in that search for more accurate truth, I gain perspective and understanding into how I retain and keep the story of my life. I am ever humbled by the folly and rewards in making such an attempt. Bio Katelyn Alain was born in Newton, MA. She received her BFA from Hartford Art School in 2001 and received her MA and MFA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. She was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in 2007. Alain currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries across the United States including Skotia Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Thinkspace (Los Angeles, CA), Stricoff Fine Art (New York, NY), Dedee Shattuck Gallery (Westport, MA), and Arcilesi Homberg Fine Art (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, American Art Collector Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, and Juxtapoz. She is currently sponsored by and a featured artist for Grumbacher Oil Paints.

Creator:
Katelyn Alain
Creation Year:
2017
Dimensions:
Height: 3.4 in (8.64 cm)Width: 2.1 in (5.34 cm)
Medium:
Oil
Movement & Style:
Academic
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Brooklyn, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU62732393953