KYLE DUNN
Name: Kyle Dunn
Age: 32
Birthplace: Livonia, Michigan, USA
Home: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Discipline: Painting
Match, 2022, courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W, New York
What’s usually the starting point of your practice?
The process can vary quite a bit from painting to painting. Sometimes it’s a particular setting I’m interested in depicting, sometimes the figure in the work dictates the setting. Most of my paintings these days begin as separate sketches that are cannibalized and combined over time. I do a lot of planning before I begin, but they often change dramatically simply because a study not at scale behaves differently than a larger painting, and the physical reality of the paint handling in the moment can take you in a different direction.
When does your work feel complete?
Near the end of working on a painting, my excitement tends to build as I can see the image locking together, I work longer hours and faster. In the beginning stages, the painting can go in so many directions, and there’s a certain relief in closing offdifferent paths one by one until you reach the end.
What are you obsessed with?
Science fiction novels - anything by JeffVanderMeer, Octavia Butler, Le Guin, etc. I almost always listen to books on tape when I’m painting.
What are the interactions that you seek between your work and the viewer?
Painting is a funny thing to me: you live in the same culture as your audience and may be influenced by the same historical or cultural moment, but it’s also about sharing your specific human weirdness, foibles and obsessions, moles and all. No novelist or painter can know how their work will be received by an audience, so you just have to follow your instincts and let the chips fall where they may.
Who are some of the artists that have been the biggest influence on you?
Lisa Yuskavage, Paula Rego, Takato Yamamoto, Tamara de Lempicka.
Where is the beauty for you today?
Always in nature. I grew up in the Midwest, substantially greener than Brooklyn where I currently live and work. I’m a bit of a news junkie, and the pace of contemporary life and politics can be so frenetic and zap me of optimism (which has to be protected these days). Unplugging occasionally has been helping me a lot.