Kirsten Valentine

About Kirsten Valentine

I am a painter, a painter obsessed with the human form, particularly the male form. Recently I was asked to come up with a pithy description of my artwork. I settled on: "I paint people. Mostly people in their underpants." A more complex description would acknowledge that I work from found photographs and part of what drives the image is the fact that it was lost or discarded, It is a fragment of a narrative. My paintings are fragments, too. They are deliberately and glaringly unfinished. I I create a detailed and complete image and with brushes, rags and knives proceed to distort, obscure, erase and manipulate the image in search of visual balance. Faces are smeared, limbs are only implied, messy brushwork and drips contrast realistic elements of academic portraiture. Even in the more ridiculous images - middle-aged men with their pants down or displaying proud, pink bellies - I try to imbue the subject with a dignity and humanity. I am deeply affectionate towards my subjects, despite, or, perhaps because of the fact that, they nameless strangers.