Postcard From the Pink City #12 Painting

Mike Kilgore is an artist and educator from New Orleans, LA, USA, working and living in Southeast Asia. Kilgore completed his senior project in painting and received an MA degree in arts administration from the University of New Orleans in 2007, before acquiring a certification in TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and leaving New Orleans for Vietnam to pursue a career as an English teacher while creating and presenting arts-education lessons for use in English as a Second Language classes. Kilgore's current works include his collection of unsigned, open edition prints, titled, "Postcards from the Pink City and Derivative Works". "Postcards from the Pink City" is a collection of mixed media and collage paintings on 10” x 7” watercolor paper, that were inspired by the artist's 2019 visit to Jaipur, India, also known as "The Pink City" due to the color of its architecture. These paintings present an abstract representation of the overall sensory experience of the time Kilgore spend in Jaipur. They display an appreciation for the colorful, architectural and sartorial beauty of The Pink City’s palaces, forts, and public spaces that the artist experienced from inside a tuk tuk, riding through the noise, heat, and smog of rush hour traffic. These works represent the exquisite culinary flavors and textures, and the scents of perfumes and spices competing with the odors of dirt, exhaust fumes, rubbish, and animal dung for a permanent place in the artist's memory. These “postcards” seek to evoke in their palette, texture, movement and composition, an emotional, psychological and sensory response analogous to that created by the unfiltered and sometimes overwhelmingly complex cacophony of flavors, textures, colors, smells, and sounds that Kilgore experienced in Jaipur, which remained fresh in his mind at the time these works were created. Postcards allow travelers to retain the memory of a special place or destination and share their experience with others. However, they often depict their subjects in artificial splendor and unnatural contexts. By removing representational images, and the false narratives these depictions create, Postcards from the Pink City use color, texture, movement and composition to produce an abstract representation of the genuine sensory and emotional experiences of the location.