Kane with Momi.
Kimono: many people are familiar with it as an article of traditional Japanese clothing. But as artist Kathy Kane points out, it’s also “such a beautiful word.” The juxtaposition is apt. In conjuring up the practical and concrete with the aesthetic and the abstract, Kane has made a series of pieces that allow her to express her most recent ideas as a thoroughly abstract painter, while marrying it to a familiar form.
The resulting show, “Kimono,” runs now through March 28 at City Gallery on Upper State Street.
In September, Kane knew she had a show coming up at City Gallery in the spring. “I knew I wanted to make a big statement,” she said. But the show turned out to be a “departure, too.”
Kane started with the idea that “I would cover the back wall with a collage,” using smaller, heaver canvases. She made hundreds of paintings. But “I realized that they were very awkward, and hard to hang.” She had the thought that she would switch to paper, which would allow her to make larger, more lightweight pieces. “I put them up on the wall and was orienting them,” and the shape came into focus. With the pieces of paper in a certain relation to one another, “I had an arm, a body … I said, ‘this is going to be a kimono.’ It was an big a‑ha moment.” Once the concept was in place, “it helped me to immerse myself in that to come up with other ideas.”
“The paint strokes are so bold — they feel masculine to me.”
Kosode.
Another piece, Kosode, was an experiment with texture, as Kane used salt and rubbing alcohol to move the paint around in ways that a brush couldn’t.
Spruce.
Another piece, Spruce, was inspired by one of Kane’s favorite ski trails in Vermont, in particular a observation her daughter made that the sky in Vermont seemed like a different color than it was in southern Connecticut. “So I set about to paint that,” Kane said — though not so much to capture the specific shade of blue as to capture the sense of being beneath it. “What I felt is what I see,” Kane said.
As an abstract painter, Kane is interested in exploring how to work the paint in different ways. She is as inclined to spill the paint directly onto the paper as she is to apply it with a brush. “I like the purity of it, the way the paint hits the paper,” which she then might further move around, with a brush, or with sponges, or with her fingers.
But settling on the shape of a kimono wasn’t entirely random, either. “I was a fiber artist before I was a painter,” Kane said, “so this brings me back.” She started off making dolls with hand-painted faces and moved to hand-painting clothing. She figured she should try selling her pieces when she was walking down the street one day wearing one of her creations and a woman jumped out of her car and ran over to ask her where she’d bought it. She noted that hand-painted clothing has gone in and out of fashion over time. “Now it’s back,” she said. Her knowledge of clothing played into one of the decisions she made about one of the pieces in the show. One is predominantly a bright ruby red as a nod to the red fabric that lines many traditional kimonos.
But the show is still very much a product of Kane’s rampant experimentation. She said she made maybe a half a dozen other pieces that didn’t quite make the cut for this exhibition, but could be “a jumping-off point” for something else in the future. “I’d like to be able to do more of these things because it’s a lot of fun.” As an abstract painter, she often just begins painting. “I don’t know where I’m going to go. I like to paint with abandon” until the pieces starts “telling me where it wants to go. The painting is totally whatever it wants to be.”
In putting together the show, Kane considered Dwight Pedersen, who installs the shows at City Gallery, to be a collaborator. Even made on paper, the pieces in “Kimono” are large and unwieldy; they don’t fit in a standard car in one piece. Pedersen visited Kane’s studio to see how Kane was putting the pieces together, and began coming up with ideas for how to hang them in the gallery space. Kane’s original idea was to lay the pieces flat against the wall, but Pedersen had other ideas as well. “When we put the pieces together on the wall and the shadow showed” — between the upper and lower piece of paper — “I said, ‘that’s it.’”
Pedersen then arranged the lights to accentuate the quality the pieces have of floating away from the wall and hovering in space. “It was a collaboration of presentation,” Kane said. Pedersen and Kane also thought about how to maintain Kane’s visions while also allowing for the way paper tends to change over time as it hangs, sometimes curling, taking on shapes that the artist doesn’t intend. But Kane also accepts some of those changes — just as she accepts how the pieces are interpreted by an audience, beyond her original intentions.
“Once you put it up, it has its own life,” she said.
“Kimono” runs now through March 28 at City Gallery, 994 State St. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.