These Fleshy Paintings Turn Awkward Moments into Art

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California-based artist Kate Klingbeil seems to relish the uncomfortable. As opposed to drawing inspiration from those more glamorous emotions like lust, fear, or sadness, her vibrant and almost cartoon-esque paintings are drawn from a place of everyday unease. Her most recent work is currently featured at Oakland, California’s Athen B. Gallery in a group show titled Hanging Gardens, alongside artists Andrea Joyce Heimer, Michael Olivo, and Woodrow White. According to Klingbeil, the group of artists are using the show to explore “illusion and escapism from different perspectives,” with its title referring to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

When it comes to her own new work, the artist starts small before thinking big. “When I start a painting I’m usually thinking about a specific occurrence, an offhand comment that sticks, the experience of eating a banana in public, the smell of rain making mud at a horse show, choking someone who asked for it, or the electric feeling of a caress from someone I’m getting to know,” Klingbeil reveals to The Creators Project. “I think a lot about awkward situations and what people do under pressure. It’s the small things, the unexpected and unintentional relationships between objects or people that spark the best paintings, the small tragedies that end up being comical. I try to take fun seriously. Jokes are important.”

Klingbeil’s portraits of women are particularly poignant in their mastery of that special sort of awkwardness people still find charming. “Since I am a woman with a body full of curves, scars, hair and secretions, this dictates my own relationship to the outside world. I’m experiencing life through the lens of the female body,” Klingbeil says of her portraits. “Being human is confusing, but also beautiful in its triumphs and failures, and I want to capture that through materials that feel fleshy, for instance, thick paint."

According to the artist, Klingbeil’s most recent collection bears a heavy influence from the busy and striking work of Hieronymus Bosch, the intricate coloring of Pieter Breugel the Elder, and the loud femininity of Cecily Brown, to name a few. Klingbeil says, “I’m inspired by other figurative artists, by artists relying on materiality, and those that use  both illusion and honesty in their work.”

“I’m trying to capture an honesty, whether that be a fantasy or a feeling of desire, anxiety, confidence‚" Klingbeil explains, "it all exists within this body.”

To see more of Kate Klingbeil’s depictions, go see her work in Hanging Gardens at Athen B. Gallery, and check out her website, here.

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