Artist of the Week: Kendra Binney

Portland's Kendra Binney creates worlds that capture her childhood through the haze and fragile nature of memory. Growing up in a small town, and spending a majority of her time barefoot, exploring all the creature around her, Kendra has a wealth of colors and images to draw from. Her images have magnetic eyes that break through her colorfully prepared canvases. These eyes reveal emotion, they reveal a world that is only known in the dreams of young girls.

Kendra's work has been shown in galleries around world, and in fact she has already participated in six shows this year. In addition to selling her pieces through galleries Kendra has operated a successful etsy shop for the last three years. Kendra takes great care to create each print that she sell by hand, and has sold over 2,100 prints.

Her work is mysterious and delicate and I am pleased she took the time to answer a few of my questions.

OA: How would you describe your work?
KB: Usually by pointing self consciously to one of the paintings and blushing. Life is full of random, fleeting moments of overwhelming joy, and sudden deep pangs of sorrow. There's this indescribable experience of opening an old cedar chest, or randomly catching some scent in the wind, where for an instance you are in another place - part of a long lost memory. I'm haunted by the inability to hold onto these things. My paintings are my way to catch what can't be caught and to express what I can't articulate.

OA: There are two main aspects of your paintings that really draw me in. First I’ll ask about your backgrounds. How many canvases do you work on at a time, and how many layers are in your typical treatment? Do the images just seem to be drawn out of the layers of paint?
KB: I tend to go from one painting to the next very unsystematically. I'm usually working on about 10 or so at once. I always feel an odd sense of urgency when I'm painting - that my arms don't move fast enough. I don't normally put much planning into the colors or where the paint drips, and try not to be bothered by spills and mistakes. They usually seem to turn into something, and I like watching how the paintings evolves in front of me. I have paintings that seem complete after 2 or 3 layers of paint, and others that have 10 or more, though I always see them through to completion.

OA: How do you select the colors that will be involved in the background of you pieces? Do you have a set palette that you like to use?
KB: I incorporate a lot of found objects - bits of paper or fabric in my paintings. A lot of times I'll be drawn to the color schemes I find in those. Living in the NW really influences my color schemes as well. Portland is a beautiful city. There's green and water everywhere, but the colors are often muted by overcast skys and misty rains. It gives the landscape a soft pastel fee. Much of how I see the world is through the watery lines of the rain drenched windows in my studio.

OA: The second aspect is the eyes of your characters. You have a unique set of eye that inhabited many of your pieces. How did those come about and when in the process do you add those eyes?
KB: The characters with the large eyes didn't really come about for any specific reason, or even at a specific time that I can remember. When I was really young, I filled pretty much every piece of paper in front of me with little drawings of girls with animals, or on swings with flowers. My parents let me draw on the insides of books to satiate me when we ran out of paper. At one point, we replaced the carpet in my childhood home. Before the new one was installed, I filled the entire floor with marker drawings of those big eyed girls. I still draw them fairly compulsively. I have pages and pages of sketches stuck on my studio walls. I usually finish the background of a painting almost completely before I place one of the drawings into it. I kind of imagine it as an existing world that the character is kind of thrown into, that she's not completely a part of, but is experiencing it with some mixture of awe and bewilderment. I imagine she's kind of autobiographical in a way.

OA: Your pieces seem to deal with issues related to our involvement with nature and the chaos that can ensue. Do you feel that is one of the primary messages?
KB: I don't know if I find it to be chaos so much as a sort of endearing absurdity. I think there can be a lot of cruelty and sorrow in the world, but at the same time there's so much indescribable beauty. I've always been kind of fascinated that these dichotomies can exist together.

OA: What’s next for Kendra Binney?
KB: ensuing chaos.

Bonus Questions:
OA: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would it be?
KB: I guess off the top of my head, I'd like to talk to Søren Kierkegaard, Naomi Wolf, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Hardy.

OA: What type of music do you enjoy and who are a few of your favorites?
KB: I like music with hidden subtleties, overwhelming percussion and lots of crescendos . Animal collective, Sin Ropas, Asobi Seksu, Phosphorescent, and Electric President have been playing in my studio a lot lately.

For more information on Kendra Binney please visit her website.