Damian Kinsella was raised in California’s Central Valley and Tehachapi Mountains and now lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife who is also an artist. He divides his time between painting objects and making objects to paint.
Statement
The first painting to make an impression on me was an old oil on panel that hung above the living room door in my grandmother’s house. A gloomy abandoned California Mission in the moonlight. It scared me to death, I didn’t like going into the room at night. It’s lost now and no one in the family knows where it is. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was very different than how I remember it, like Bob Dylan said “I can’t remember if that’s how it went or not, it didn’t matter. It’s what I thought he said that mattered.” The impression was the thing. I’d give anything to get my hands on that painting now. It was a painting I feared the most, and now I paint.
I draw inspiration from times of seclusion in silent places. Dirt and rust, the Mojave at midnight, boots in the sand. Distant gulls off the cold coast fly past rocks like falling ash. Lost and lonely places without names or residents swallowed up by sand and sage, things that come with the dust and are gone with the wind as it has been so aptly put. Objects and implements that are 200 years old if they’re a day, artifacts of who we are and what we’ve done.