Kristin Gile likes her paintings to be interactive
Kristin Gile was 4 years old when she drew a picture better than her Dad could draw it.
“There was a segment on the local PBS channel that challenged viewers to draw an image that was broadcast for 20 minutes. My father and I took up the challenge. He saw my picture and decided that I was definitely the better artist,” says Gile.
zeeBigBang spoke with Gile who said she didn’t commit to her art until her mid-twenties. Her paintings reveal a “profound respect for life and its diversity,” she says. They reflect a quirky sense of playful humor accentuated with the emotional tension between happiness and sorrow. For Gile, her work expresses the “balance and recognition of realities.”
Gile paints primarily in acrylics and watercolors. She says she wants her paintings to be interactive. “I want people to touch my paintings. There are many different layers, shapes and textures. There’s no one right way to look at one of my paintings. For me, it is pure joy to work on my art and to see what others receive from it.”
Kristin has developed her own technique for creating layers of texture in her acrylic works. She uses plastic sandwich bags. She fills them with paint, sometimes adds rocks, pumice or beads and constructs various types of exit holes to let the filling seep out – much like a pastry chef.
Kristin’s personal life and her art took a dramatic turn when Hurricane Katrina devastated her home, New Orleans and Louisiana, where she lived with her husband Nick. Ironically, they had been in the city for every hurricane – except Katrina. They were in South America. They tried to make their way back home but weren’t allowed back into the city. To thank those people who fed and housed them, Kristin created a series of voodoo doll paintings. “Although people often think of voodoo dolls as negative, they are really more about positivity and healing.”
Kristin’s paintings now have greater meaning as she expresses the joy, pain, celebration, mourning and depth of life’s experiences.
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Chris Sandvoss hard at work as a master luthier.
