Kay Danley on her show,“Painting the In Between”, and her Practice as a Painter (continued)

Influences
I am not developed enough as a painter to solve all of my visual problems. If I have an idea and it's not working, I go to a reference. The reference may be a great master, it may be an art movement where  visual problems have been solved successfully. I use references as a guideline. I'll use imagery that speaks to me and I will make a collage out of those images. It's a simple collage, it's not a beautiful or accomplished collage, but a conglomeration of ideas that I might use. The collage is a point of departure, where I will use one part of the image or another part of the image, and then I'll make up something and then I'll move it around the composition. The collage is a starting point to the process and those references are part of it.

I've looked at so many different artists that allow me to see better in a certain ways. One that comes to the to mind is the” Society of Six”. They were landscape painters that worked in the Bay Area. I'm not particularly interested in painting landscape, but the way they handled paint has been an influence. I think of the way they loaded their brush and the way their brushstrokes expressed direction and texture and juiciness. The other influential movement is the German expressionists. I like the way they combine realism with expression. It’s an abstracted realism with a lot of emotion that includes gaiety and darkness too. I've learned a lot from their approach.

I identify most with figurative painting. Figures in my paintings are prominent, but they're also nonspecific. They're meant to be universal symbols that could represent any human being. I'm not interested in specificity for figures even though I'm trained in that. I'm more interested in showing how the figures complete a mood or an atmosphere and contribute to what's going on in the environment. The environment is as important as the figures. Animals are a little different. It's one of my dearest wishes that humans will eventually share the Earth more than they do now. Other species that are not human have as much or more to offer the earth than we do. The creatures that come up in my paintings convey hope that one day they can have a more total symbiotic relationship with humans.

The Work Presented in “Painting the In Between.”
I curated the show so the large paintings would fit together in terms of their color, mood, and atmospheric effect. I want the collection of paintings to be unified. The narratives of the paintings have a thread as well, whether it's figures or animals or people in a cafe or a house on a hill. You will look at those paintings and know that they come from the same source.

On People Viewing Her Work
I hope the viewer can leave the gallery with a sense of mystery. I hope that they will look at the paintings and wonder what that story was, and perhaps connect to their own feelings and their own story. My story is not specific, it's the “in between,” and everybody has their own “in between.” I hope that the color and the composition will summon something to think about. It's totally beyond enjoy. It's not supposed to be pretty. I want it to be powerful in terms of how it reaches somebody.

Creating and Developing Her Work
A great deal of cerebral thinking goes into my paintings and I don't want to turn it off because it helps me create an image that is readable. I'm not trying to create something specific or beautiful. I have to work with my cerebral mind to manifest all the other stuff. It starts with an idea. My best work is work that I thought about prior to the making. I can face an empty canvas and begin. But it's not my preference. It may be something about relationships between people, it may be the connection of people to their environment. I have to conceive both the figuration and the environment — one is not more important than the other — they are a whole, and the whole has to work or nothing works. I have to use my cerebral brain to consider the whole. I can't just say I'm doing whatever, I'm just being spontaneous. A lot of people can be spontaneous and do it successfully. But I cannot. I have to use my emotions, my cerebral brain, my experiences, and then I begin. I'm a very fast painter. I don't know why but it is just part of me. And then I step back, and I use my brain to figure out whether this is the structure that will hold the painting. If it's not a structure that will hold the painting, I get to work to try to get that structure. That desirable structure may take 20 or 30 tries.​
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A Preview of Four Paintings

“It Happens at Night”
It Happens at Night is a painting that goes along well with the “in between.” When I first started this painting, I almost painted over a lot of it because I thought it was too busy. There's a lot going on in it and I thought perhaps that’s too much. In the end, I decided not to paint it over. I got some feedback from other people and I now appreciate it more as an atmosphere. There’s a feeling of nighttime, shadows are on the ground and people are going about their business. The viewer wonders what these people are doing and where they're going. The buildings are skewed and bowed and the perspective is a little off, but that contributes to the mood. I had a very vivid dream of a fire escape, and I thought, I'm going to put that on the side of that building. I am not sure what it means. Stairs have been a personal symbol which I use in a lot of my paintings. I'm also interested in lighting. The way that this painting is lit enhances the atmosphere. I like to mess with lighting. I like when the  light bounces off and illuminates certain areas that may not be “real”. It's very much like a dream. It's mysterious and you wonder, what's around the corner?

“A Good Novel”
This painting is called “A Good Novel” because of the figure in the corner. That figure is repeated in another cafe painting that will be in my show. I was interested in the feeling of being alone in a public place. This is a tavern or bar or restaurant, but it’s unclear what’s going on behind the counter. Why is that person walking through? There's often somebody by themselves in a bar, which begs the question what are they doing to pass the time? If you're alone, do you need a book or a phone to feel comfortable? Where are the stairs leading? How could I light the back, but not the front? I used a very limited palette and there's not a lot of variation in color. It's mostly red, a lot of neutrals, but the palette is limited. That is the cerebral part. How can I use that limited palette and still light it so that it's interesting and provocative?

“Flight”
This is another example of the “in between.” Consider the aberrant lighting —  are they lights or are they globes? Are they planets? In several of my paintings there are references to art history through the columns and the colonnades. I enjoy those shapes. Without that structure to the composition the figures would not be grounded. I like to make sure the figures reside somewhere. One figure is levitating, not really residing, but yet there is a visual structure behind those two figures. In order for the figures to be most effective, they need to reside.

“Colonnade and a Fox”
​This painting is more intense in color than I usually paint, especially the yellow. This is a good example of the importance of geometry to me. Even though there's so much abstraction in my paintings, geometry — even if it’s used minimally — provides a necessary structure. I love the colonnade shape. After I painted this painting, I saw a painting of De Chirico. He's an Italian painter that painted town scenes with colonnades and very distinctive shadows. After I painted this, I noticed the similarity. A lot of what I have read and viewed comes out subconsciously. What was interesting about this painting was what I could infer within the empty spaces of the colonnade and the relationship of the fox to the human figure. I made the figure transparent. It's a little bit of a kink that I put into a lot of paintings, it's a little bit strange.