Issue 7 Artist Spotlight | Lydia Kinney

C+B: Tell us about yourself, Lydia!

LK: I'm a recent full-time artist after several years in manufacturing-- and really enjoying it! In my now more substantive studio time, I've returned to regularly reading through audiobooks, and I'm finding a lot of inspiration in fiction works like Severance, When We Cease To Understand the World, Breasts and Eggs, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or nonfiction work like In The Dream House, Except for Palestine, and Debt. Maybe not the most uplifting reading lists, but it's certainly given me a lot to chew on!

C+B: What is something you've learned as a creator, that you would want to pass on to younger creators?

LK: So many creators say this, because it's very important: keep making. Keep making to stay in the habit of working, to stay in dialogue with the work, to improve for one's own standards. Keep making in the wake of rejection. Keep making in the wake of an accomplishment. Keep making to preserve the drive to make the work. Keep making as long as it makes sense to keep making.

C+B: Imagine it's 2075. What do you hope your work is remembered and recognized for?

LK: So much of my artwork is about radical imagination---in part because I struggle to imagine 2075 full stop. I've put my studio practice where I may have otherwise committed to a conventional family, a conventional job, a house, a deliberately apolitical outlook. As such it seems likely to me that looking back on this work in 2075, it will look like a resigned liberation of creative capacity. I hope to be caught in a post-zombie-formalism wind: that the work will retain some reflection of possibility. If nothing else, I hope not to be a huge pain to future conservators.

Find and support Lydia here:

IG: @l.m.kinney
Website: lydiamkiney.com

Lydia Kinney

(Yellow, 30in x 24in, acrylic on canvas, ©Lydia Kinney)

My ideal creative workspace: My current studio, which I've been in since 2018, is a true gem, and with some mindfulness is spacious, reasonably lit, quiet, and very much mind. I need the space to be a true goblin for hours at a time and this space affords it. Ideally, over time, I would find ways to make studio visits / dialog a bigger aspect of my creative environment.

If I could have coffee with any creator (past or present): It might be Prince! I recently watched a live version of It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night and I'm still stunned by the orchestration it takes to perform at that scale. Being able to hold that many intersecting concepts of song, dance, theatrics, crowd work, and collaboration is mind-blowing to me. It would take me years to make a painting as complex as Prince (and a dozen other performers, crew, etc) accomplishes in so little time, with such unflinching conviction.
Of course I'd want a peek behind the curtain. There's a mystique added to Prince as a creative, in part because he was so innovative, and it takes away from his work as an excellent collaborator.