Kayla Plosz Antiel is the latest artist to exhibit on Art Hound’s sister site, Buy Some Damn Art. Antiel received an MFA in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and currently lives in the greater Washington D.C. area. Her square paintings with their bold colors and texture are fresh, playful and approachable.
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Tell us about your art practice
I paint in that sort of “call and response” method a lot of abstract painters share: making a mark, responding to it. Because I’m really motivated by color and the materiality of paint, my process is an ongoing dialectic between my initial and intuitive bodily response to color and texture and my more heady or logical decisions regarding form. I’m always working on a thousand paintings at once, continuously building up surfaces. Yet, I often find myself reworking pieces I was certain were resolved. It’s a frustrating process. Newly primed panels make me uncomfortable, so I tend to rework existing paintings until I have to begin new ones.
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What inspired the paintings in this show
My respect for classic forms like still lifes combined with my interest in color and abstraction. At least that was the starting idea—my paintings sort of take over as I’m working.
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How has your work changed over the years? Have you always worked abstractly
This is a tough question as I vacillate between abstraction and representation. I’ve been painting abstractly in one form or another since undergrad, but I’ve always maintained an interest in representational work. In graduate school I used suggestive representation to confine or limit my abstract work. I often began with a concrete form which tended to become more abstracted through the process. I do see myself slowly coming back around to a more pure representational mode of painting, but there’s something exciting to me about working in the space between.
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What keeps you going as an artist
I’m inspired by the exciting new work I see coming from other artists, by discovering new things or new ways to see old artists, and through watching the ever-changing, always new ways my son discovers the world each day.
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