Artist's statement: The imagery in my work highlights those aspects of life which are simple yet significant to the individual: families, friendships, communities, time and memories. Through these aspects, larger issues such as war, the military, death and decay, the loss of innocence, regret and mourning are touched upon as well. 

My paintings are personal and often autobiographical. I frequently use candid photos as source material, the kind of photographs whose lot in life is to make their way into scrapbooks or be tapped onto refrigerator doors. They are a physical and visual way of remembering.  I use photos as source material because they are nostalgic, romantic, and deeply personal. How do you mourn someone? How do you cope with the permanency of death? A photo can be a connection to the past and yet it can also be a constant reminder of one’s regrets, the permanency of time, and the inability to change the past.  When photographs are then translated into paintings, the translation interests me because the photographs carry specific memories and associations for a particular person (a family member, a lover, a friend) and yet as a painting, the meaning becomes universal.   


  Q:                   Hey Kristen, thanks for showing us your work.  In your artist statement you say that you draw inspiration from the significance found in simplicity. Have you always been fascinated in the daily occurrences and their deeper meanings? When did you realize that this is what you wanted to depict in your paintings?   


  A:                   I’ve always been interested in drawing people, especially people that I know. I usually draw or paint them doing every day things. Even as a kid I never drew dinosaurs or unicorns, just my friends and family. Maybe I wasn’t a very creative child in that way! I don’t think that I really considered it my chosen subject until I came to art school and realized that other people weren’t interested in the same things that I was. Only then did I realize that I had a unique interest in the things and people in my everyday life which led me to think about the deeper and larger themes behind my images.   


  Q:                   One of the drawbacks in a photograph is its lack of emotional depth. No matter how powerful the equipment, sometimes it’s just impossible to capture a moment or a scene the way you remember it. Do you try to find the story behind a photograph when warranting its influence on your paintings in order to better depict feeling?   


  A:                   I wouldn’t say that photos lack emotional depth; they actually have a lot of different emotions packed into them. I do agree that a camera can’t capture a moment the same way that you remember it. That’s one reason why I find photos interesting. Photographs aren’t frozen memories at all. More often than not they become images that we base our memories off of. Also when I keep speaking about photos I don’t mean to comment on photography as an art form, I am specifically thinking about candid photos: photos taken by the average Joe, for the average Joe, to be stuck in the average Joe’s wallet or his holiday card, or his photo album, or Facebook. Almost all of the photographs that I paint from are my own or family photos so I know the stories behind them. I definitely see a specific narrative in the photo and the painting but I don’t feel that it’s important for the viewer to see, feel, experience in my painting the same things that I see, feel, or experience when I look at the photo. I hope that the viewer’s experiences something more powerful or poignant because of its translation into a painting than it would have been had the viewer just seen the photo tacked to the wall.   


  Q:                    How much attention do you pay to the titles of your work? For example, the title Safe With Me  perfectly describes the couple lost in the security of a deep kiss, or         how Morning Eyes makes me think that the subject wishes it were a snow day.   


  A:                  I never paid very much attention to titles until I started to submit work to shows but I think that they’re a really interesting idea to play with. A title can add extra                   information that can either be helpful or harmful to a piece. A title can give a hint at what the artist is thinking about. Since a lot of my work is painted from such personal images to begin with I don’t want to make the painting overly personal so that it’s no longer accessible for others.  Lately I have liked titles that are personal and rather cheesy, and yet don’t give away too much. A lot of them are pieces from song lyrics, inside jokes and nick names, or some of them are just the names of places or people that I feel are significant for me. The title Safe With Me actually comes from a line of a Bon Iver song. The whole line is “this is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization. It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away. Your love will be safe with me.” For me the drawing isn’t about lovers lost in a kiss, it’s about the way that one remembers someone after the kiss is over and after they are gone. I’m glad that you interpreted it differently, if I had given the drawing a different title or used the whole line from the song I might have forced you to see what I see and that would be boring.   


  Q:                   Miss Moon and Safe With Me both look like similar couples, but the feeling       resonating off each piece is different. Do you sometimes use a single photograph                   as a model for multiple pieces in an effort to explore different feelings in that                   specific moment in time?   


  A:                   Both Miss Moon and Safe With Me are based off of the same photo but I didn’t  use the same photo multiple times specifically because I wanted a different read or emotion. I paint from the same source photo a lot just to experiment. I probably made around five or six drawings from that one photo. But I think that it’s interesting to paint the same thing multiple times because each time lends a different touch, read and emotion. I’m glad to hear that you feel that different  feelings resonate from Miss Moon than Safe With Me because I have a lot of emotions tied up in that photo and both pieces probably touch on different aspects of that.   


  Q:                   Your first piece, Carl, is a vivid display of how different layers and smears of paint can form something, while not really drawing anything specifically like Carl’s eyes. What is it about paint that entices you the most?   


  A:                   A professor pointed out once that I never draw eyes! I do, but more often than not I find ways around it without even meaning to. I like the paintiness of paint. I like wet paint. I like how thick and goopy oil paint can be. I like to work with wet paint on top of wet paint. Sometimes I don’t paint the details because it’s less fun and not always necessary.   


  Q:                   What is the boy shoving into the girl’s mouth in Skinny Love? Pizza? It looks   good.  

A:                   A tortilla chip!  

Q:                    What are some of your plans for the future? Where would you ideally like to take your work? What do you look for in a painting?   


  A:                   The real question is where my work will take me. I’m actually very uncertain about the future at the moment. I’ll always be painting and I see myself painting                   from a personal place, whether or not I continue working from photographs. I’m sure of that because painting helps me to think and to process things. I hope that the paintings that I make will help someone else, too. I don’t expect them to bring about world peace but I hope to make something that matters to someone besides myself. Vincent van Gogh wrote that “a good picture is equivalent to a good deed.”  

Q:                   For all the younger Pudding readers out there, can you offer any advice based on your personal experiences as a painter? What are some basic hurdles you wish                   you knew about when entering college?  

A:                    Listen to yourself.  Think about what really interests you and let work come from there. If something matters to you then you can make something good out of it. Be patience. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike but keep painting anyway, yet, if you feel that you need time to just think then give yourself that time.  All of these  things come back to my original point though which is: Listen to yourself.    


  Q:                   Thank you again for sharing with The Pudding, Kristen. How can we keep up with your progress or contact you?   


  A:                    Thank you so much for the interest! I have a website, www.kristenemoore.com and I also have a blog which I am usually better about updating, www.kristenemoore.blogspot.com.