Damian Kinsella's paintings convey a serious mood, a reflection on artifacts and found objects that point to history and memory. “My work is often said to be haunting. I didn’t appreciate that at first but I’ve come to realize the truth of it.”

 

When painting still life, he often painstakingly recreates his subjects to get the right effect for a painting. Beading, carving, aging objects to set them back a hundred years or so, even the backgrounds of his work are often “faked” to lend authenticity to a scene. Drawing from a lifelong love of history, forgotten arts and crafts and scale models and dioramas, he'll sometimes create an entire scene to light and paint as a reference. He refers to this process as making an “honest forgery.” When he isn’t painting in studio he’s riding out to the high desert to paint what he calls “sketchy places,” often in moonlight. His landscape work focuses on abandonment, on empty places where people just up and left, the tension of places where the west still remains a bit wild. “I’m haunting it, it’s haunting me...” He continues,

 

“When I was very young, before my family moved to Tehachapi, I’d visit my grandmother and stay with her. Two things came together for me on those visits. She had this dark back room full of artifacts, family history, my great grandfathers hand drawn maps of the town, jars of arrowheads, pieces of six shooters he’d found while hunting in the hills around town, photos of people going back to the civil war. I’d spend hours there. The other thing that was pivotal for me was an old nocturne painting, an abandoned mission in the moonlight, in her living room. I was terrified of that painting… so naturally it follows that now I go out and paint in the moonlight in the desert. I’m sure I could pay someone to explain that to me, but I’d rather just go paint."

Damian Kinsella, 2024

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