Artist Statement

Subject matter in my work has  moved from still life, everyday places, objects, and the domestic world,  to landscape, to an interest in themes of nature, the seasons, and impermanence. As a young painter I wanted to elevate stereotypical “woman’s” subject matter and make it stand out as something important and vital. As a mature painter I am still painting about the poetry of the everyday.

In mid-career I encountered Japanese Edo screen paintings in the Metropolitan’s Asian Wing in New York, and my attention turned away from perspectival, Western space. I began experimenting with diptych and triptych formats, and I eliminated the horizon line. Removing the fixed viewpoint can create multiple, varied points of view in a painting. Color and decoration, intervals and negative spaces took over paintings based loosely on the changing seasons.

Flowers have made an appearance in my work at many points in time. During the Covid lockdown in 2020, my daughter moved home to live in my studio building, sequestered during her nursing grad program. I began the series of flower improvisations while sharing studio space with my painter husband, Robert Poplack. In response to working in a shared space, and in reaction to the anxiety of the pandemic, I began daily paintings of flowers seen close up. The flowers provided color, movement, form and the need to work fast. I enjoyed the abstraction of the gestural underdrawings and the touch-by-touch accumulation of marks as I painted.

Currently I am working on triptych paintings broken up by branches, leaves and plants, and the compositions are variously tangled and open, dense and spare.  I began this new body of work while on an artist residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in October, 2022.

Deborah Kirklin
Sebastopol. CA
March 2023