ARTIST STATEMENT
Attention is the purest form love takes. When one’s focus becomes increasingly scattered in the information age, can tactility, tenderness, and blinding optimism remedy overly nihilistic perspectives? These paintings are part of a series that live as a romantic’s response to this tension between what exists in the present moment and what distracts. Using personal and appropriated imagery collaged as a base, each piece contemplates awareness, the pursuit of it, where it lives, how it feels, and what is at stake when it’s scarce. The inane joy I feel when I catch myself in states of total presence is worth studying, celebrating, and most definitely memorializing in paint and pencil in this laborious manor.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Caitlyn Doran is the current Drawing and Painting Artist-In-Residence at Lillstreet Art Center. A figurative painter and educator born in Illinois and based in Chicago, she received her BFA in Drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2016 and also attended the Kanazawa College of Art’s Masters oil painting program in 2018/19 in Japan. She is the recipient of the Albert P. Weisman award in 2021 and 2022 as well as a Luminarts Fellowship.
She completed her MFA at Columbia College Chicago in 2022 and is a teaching artist for Chicago Public School community programs. Doran regularly participates in group exhibitions in the midwest and abroad. Her third solo exhibition: Wishful Thinking was recently held in Lillstreet Art Center’s Annex Gallery. Doran’s work captures the instant where the banal meets the fantastic, specifically personal encounters, both real and imagined, between humans, their animals, their objects, and each other.
© Caitlyn Doran