Mimi Pinnow

My paintings identify with and create a space for the ruminating, daydreaming, and contemplations that often are reserved for a solo walk in the rain or a golden hour stroll. Where the visuals of reality warp and transform to match the stories and emotions that a person recounts or revisits within their innermost thoughts. Magic realism of the everyday emerges in this work and connects the viewer back to themselves.  

 

Through my paintings I invite the viewer to place their perception into a world of objects and interiors. Here they can let go of the unstable cultural structures we have adopted to find protection from the world at large. In letting go there is an opportunity to find beauty in the nuance of object becomings and turn to find that in the overlooked qualities of people. My paintings feature everyday objects, heirlooms, and spaces that have a life of their own.  Sweeps of transparent paint create light sources that illuminate the objects,  suspending them in moments of meditation and melancholy. While I work from observation, I translate the objects from my perception to the painting. This reveals dialogs of shadows and chromatic pairings that existed between the world of the source objects, but were highlighted through painting. 

 

Painting these rhyming forms and associations, allows me to build the structure of a hand-held world hovering in atmospheric light and shadow. The different viscosities of the paint allow the objects to come forward and recede. This opens the door for the viewer to enter the world of the painting, past a perspectival illusion of depth, into a place where they can picture situating themselves in the space before picking up the objects and handling them.  In the solitary viewing experience of the painting the viewer may discover small, imaginative, and uncanny worlds and objects imbued with life. These worlds reveal themselves through patient looking. The objects and interiors arrange islands of stability and spaces where the viewer can negotiate with different parts of themselves and their relationships with others.