The Westerly Sun_The sky's the limit for artist Constance Kilgore (January 19)

19.01.2008

By Marshall Williams

(Created: Saturday, January 19, 2008 12:29 AM EST)

Monumental cloud formations play a dramatic role in many painters’ works, such as the American landscapist Albert Bierstadt or England’s John Singer Sargent, both of whom seem to influence Kilgore’s own painting. But with them, the sky is still just a part of the landscape. For Kilgore, the sky’s the thing. Any bits of earth seem to be sketched in at the very bottom, almost as an afterthought or simply as a way to point the eyes upward.

Clouds at sunrise or sunset, clouds building before a storm, clouds getting swept from sea to shore by a powerful wind, clouds far above our heads, hanging in a glistening sky – these are Kilgore’s only subjects for her large, four-foot-by-four-foot canvases. Particularly remarkable is the fact that these paintings, while they seem to depict very specific weather events, come out of Kilgore’s head; she doesn’t work from nature or from photographs or even memories.

"These are abstractions," Kilgore says. "I’m usually not a representational painter. I really just start by putting paint onto canvas. Sometimes I have an idea of the direction I want to go in, but it’s a real journey." Pointing to one painting (quickly snapped up by a buyer during Kilgore’s opening), she says, "that painting started out looking very different; I left it one day and came back the next day and it began changing quickly. At one point, I was sweating and saying ‘oh, my God, what am I doing?’ But it came back together, I’m pleased to say. Now I’m particularly happy with that one. But I’m intuitive; I just start to paint and dive right in, and just work on what I think of as clouds. After a while I’ll throw a strip of land at the bottom so people know where they are."

Kilgore says she looks for the abstractions – the depths, the colors, the play of light – when she looks toward the clouds. "I want to capture the sense of expansiveness when you look at the sky, something that everyone is moved by. There are times when the depths in the sky are just remarkable, the sense of foreground and background, and that’s what I try to do in the paintings. Everything is there – a sense of distance, clouds can be really low, or really far away, and the sun and the light are constantly changing."

That’s one particular effect that Kilgore tries to capture in her paintings. "When they’re hung in a room with sunlight, the paintings change during the day as the sunlight comes and goes. The colors will change, in some paintings they change a lot, and in the late afternoon sun they look very different. I love that, and that’s part of living with a painting, I think. Art is a visceral thing, and when you buy a painting you’ll live with it for a long time. It becomes another personality in the house.

"I enjoyed doing these," Kilgore says of her current paintings in the Hoxie Gallery. "They’re very exhilarating when they come out right, and in a space like the Hoxie, they show up very, very well. It’s an expansive space so you get a real sense of the paintings."

One particular influence was the John Singer Sargent show in Boston a few years ago, Kilgore says. "Here were these mountain landscapes," she says, "and from far away you see a big painting, and it’s perfect, but you walk up close to it and it completely disintegrates. You say ‘how did he do that?’ If I wanted to bring somebody back to life, it would be him."

Kilgore, whose career has encompassed London, Europe, New York and New England, became intrigued with what she calls the "skyscape" during a trip to Estonia, in the northern reaches of central Europe, several years ago. "The first time I went to Estonia was in 2002," she says, when she was invited for a residency at an art center, "and I was so moved by the light, in that northern environment. It was light all night, and I would get up at 3 in the morning, and the sun is rising and clouds would be rushing over my head, and there was a light inside these clouds, it was just extraordinary."

Kilgore gave an exhibition at the Polli Talu Arts Centre, and returned for another exhibition in Estonia in 2006, which she gave the doubly apt title of "Light As Air." She and her husband Robert Utter, who live in North Stonington and own Other Tiger bookstore in Westerly, now have a home in Estonia as well.

"There is just so much light, and it’s very flat so the sky is big, it can be quite stormy, and the sky moves and changes all the time."

Kilgore says her turbulent skies are "a metaphor for the power of nature, the expanse of the unknown, and a tribute to the certainty of change – the sky is always changing, nothing is constant. Deep, dark clouds might roll and shift across the sky, shedding curtains of drenching rain, but there is always light dancing and playing beyond the storm."

Kilgore was born in Texas and grew up in New York City, in Manhattan. She has five brothers, all involved with the performing arts, she says. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Colorado, and a master of arts from New York University. She studied with the late Elmer Bischoff and with Stanley Boxer, and was given a master teacher’s fellowship at the Vermont Studio in Johnson, Vt.

In the late 1970s, as a young American artist living in London, Kilgore attracted significant attention when her painting "Georgica" was admitted to the prestigious John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, where it hung amid works by David Hockney, Patrick Heron and Howard Hodgkin. Two years later, she had another work accepted for the Liverpool Exhibition, and those two works now hang in British art museums.

Though she’s always considered herself an abstract painter, her work at that time was informed by the English landscape, she says, "particularly by prehistoric earthworks and stone circles found throughout Britain. I considered these monuments and markings to be a form of communication, predating written language, whose message has since been muddied or lost."

Abstraction, Kilgore seems to believe, is easier for an audience to take if it’s rooted to some degree in nature.

In 1981, Kilgore returned to the U.S., maintaining a studio in New York City, where she painted and taught, until the early 1990s. After a brief time in San Francisco, she came to North Stonington and purchased an old schoolhouse in Laurel Glen, near Denison Hill Road. For several years she ran the Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport. Now she lives with her husband on Grindstone Hill Road, and she’s just built a new studio.

Kilgore’s paintings can be seen at Other Tiger, at the Trade Winds Gallery in Mystic, and also at her new web site, www.constancekilgore.com.

"Selling my schoolhouse took a lot of energy," she says. "I’m ready to get serious now, and really devote myself to my painting."