Krista Kilvert

As a mixed media artist, it had been many years since over recent years engaging in painting process in the ?fragments? body of work on stretched canvas. Merging the media-oriented digital world of ?instantaneous? with the physical and personal process of painting, has been an interesting undertaking that has merged past and present art practises into one.

In creating these mixed-media paintings I begin with a raw stretched canvas and build up multiple layers of shellacs and lacquer based paints, starting with metallic pigments. Often the process involves months of drying as the various mediums react to another, creating serendipitous and unexpected textural qualities. The process involves not only building up a surface, but sometimes, also scraping it back down in an effort to build a visual surface with aged character. At a certain point I layer photographic imagery in between more layers of transparent lightly pigmented varnishes. The image itself has been printed on a very delicate transparent digital media, which is custom produced for me.

My photographic imagery is often organic, nature-based, yet somewhat abstracted as the work for me conceptually and symbolically is intended to reference life, which as with nature is layered and vulnerable... whether that be in the reality of any given moment or in memories of the past. In the end it is often only mere fragments that remain bear witness to that which once was.