Koan for Kini Collins
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In fact, she doesn’t. But if she did, if they started showing up in her work, she hopes they'd be welcome. "If I see something I'm doing that disturbs me, that I didn't know was in me," Kini says, "I want to keep doing it. If I start painting pink unicorns, I hope I'll continue, even if it grosses me out."
Last year, Kini decided she'd spent enough energy trying to promote and sell her work—her paintings and sculpture. She stopped submitting to shows, pulled her work from the galleries that represented her, and quit attempting to make a living from art. Now, she only sells her art directly out of her studio, and she sells it for the aggregate cost of her materials, calculating the total amount it takes to make her work and then dividing that
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Though she isn't sure this has had an effect on what she paints, she feels the liberation of her decision. "I don't feel like I have to repeat myself to satisfy a gallery or the market. I know that whatever I'm making, I'm being true to myself."
The challenge for any artist is to keep on compass, to find the still point of their creative life and make sure that, among the business of art, the art stays central. For Kini, this challenge is paramount, and one she keeps mindful at all times. The moral content of her work is, as she says, as important as the aesthetic. In fact, they're much the same thing.
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Also interesting is the stillness that envelops the birds. Kini sculpts pigeons and sparrows out of wire mesh and plaster, perching them on rough blocks of wood. The nervous energy usually associated with birds is quieted, and there is a turned-inward quality, the wings and eyes calm and restful.
"What I like to do," Kini says, "is find the essence of something and see if it fits inside my integrity sphere, whether it resonates with me emotionally, morally, and physically." This search
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For many years, Kini practiced martial arts, moving for a time to
The materials Kini uses in her art—thick applications of paint, wax, sand, plaster, charcoal—and her love of laboring
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Far from troubling her though, Kini enjoys these kinds of paradoxes and seeks them out. On the one hand, she speaks of the inward quality of her art, how her birds and cityscapes are always some reflection of her thoughts. Later, she tells me that her spine series, elongated depictions of backbones in paint and wax, are the only truly personal work she has done, reflecting her struggles with disc degeneration. The apparent contradictions here do not seem to bother her, probably because both are true in their own context. For Kini, the tension betw
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That attraction to the hard won, the struggled for, is the same attraction she has to her subjects. Kini likes pigeons, sparrows, because they are the underdogs of the bird world, the neglected and sometimes despised, who nevertheless scratch out a good living among the streets and dirty buildings of the city. "These are working-class birds!" she says, pleased with the idea. They fit within the sphere of her integrity, the still point of her contemplation, as well as the scrappy physicality of work and the urban landscape. No pink unicorns, these city birds, though maybe one day they'll join them on verdant pastures.
6 Comments:
bravo, dear friends! beautiful interview, images, artist. thank you.
this was a pleasure. What a great blog, and I love your choices.
thanks, Bev!
Oh I love Kinis work...wish I had known about her art sales. I always wanted a Kini piece. I t would have been a difficult decision for me as to which one! Glad I mentioned to interview you for this blog.
Wow Great Post, Thank you for sharing such a impressive Post.
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