"I can’t undo that photographic training—it’s embedded in how I begin a painting," Danielle Mckinney, Juxtapoz Summer 2021 cover artist, has said. "First, I paint the canvas with a black ground, and that black ground serves almost like the camera’s viewfinder. It allows me to build the image." And it seems with every new show, this time Golden Hour at Marianne Boesky, Mckinney is going deeper and deeper into a quiet solitude of memory and fantasy, scenes of introspection that don't illict an era but a feeling and an emotion. If Jazz or the Blues had a quietness, they exist here.
When we spoke with Mckinney last year, she said, "Figures are a way for me to find solace or comfort in these interior environments. It’s really reflective of thoughts, emotions, or things that have happened. Smoking a cigarette in silence with your own thoughts, or having a Negroni and feeling warm and fuzzy on the inside—they’re very inner-reflective and based on things that have triggered me in my own life. " And she seems to have made her characters even more comfortable, more of a fantasy with Master paintings in the background, as if harkening a complete sense of where we all think we could be. —Evan Pricco
