When was the last time you slowed down? A new exhibit of landscape paintings at The Frick Environmental Center in Pittsburgh’s Frick Park invites visitors to examine “the quiet spaces that exist beyond the pace and noise of everyday life.”
The relatively small works – most are 11 x 11 inches – line the sun-lit hallway of the center. The exhibit is called “The Long Walk” and it’s by Pittsburgh-based, multidisciplinary artist DS Kinsel, co-founder of the creative hub BOOM Concepts. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently visited the center to view the pieces and talk with DS Kinsel about them.
LISTEN to the interview:
Kara Holsopple: Could you describe one of the pieces?
DS Kinsel: The works are encaustic, which is wax, kind of layered on top of glass. So you get this nice build of wax and pigment and color. The image is a field, a field of grass with a rolling blue sky. This work in particular, all the works, are made in pairs. So if you look through the exhibit, you can find the other pair.
Kara Holsopple: Like mirror images of each other or do they work together?
DS Kinsel: They would be considered diptychs. The two images together create one scene. I’ve had the pair separated on the wall just to kind of fracture your experience, but each pair goes together. So if people do the acquisition, they would get two as opposed to the one.
Kara Holsopple: You mentioned the process is called encaustic. Have you used that before? How did you learn it?
DS Kinsel: One of the things that I’m excited about when sharing this work is this is the style of painting that I began with when I started my art career. A lot of people know me for other types of work, maybe stuff that’s a little bit more confrontational or agitational. These landscapes, these really kind of pretty pictures – when I started trying to be an artist around my early 20s, I had access to a lot of candles. And a lot of crayons. So I was just really experimenting. We all know crayons, so it was easy for me as a self-taught artist to kind of enter in with a discipline and a medium that was really familiar.
And I just started melting them, and nothing is original. So when I started to do research about who melts crayons? Who melts wax and paraffin? Where does this come from? I found out it’s one of the oldest ways of making art. Ancient Roman and Greek artisans and some ancient Egyptian artisans used wax to create images in tombs or on ceramic items, pots and things of that nature. Very different from this style. You see more contemporary and encaustic works that are abstract or landscape-based, but it was about what could I get my hands on? And figuring out how other artists across time have used the same medium to make artwork.
Kara Holsopple: What was the impetus behind these pieces?
DS Kinsel: I have been making work that’s a little bit more confrontational, a little darker or kind of deeper, and I needed something lighter. I needed a little break from the subject matter. My wife actually has been asking me over and over again, when are you gonna make those landscapes like when we first started dating or when you first started being an artist?
I’ve been doing some travel. During my various residencies, I like to take long walks. I’m, you know, away from the family, away from BOOM Concepts, away from the city, and I just love to take an adventure in nature. These artworks in particular are inspired from my time in France, in a small town called Orquevaux , where we would walk through the fields. I recently traveled to Greece, to the historic site of Philippi, which was identified in the Bible as one of the first places for Christianity. And I was thinking about the fields there amongst the ruins. And then, you know, walking through Frick Park with my family and just across town as I grew up – thinking about long walks that I’ve taken recently and during my history and trying to really capture that in the artwork.
Kara Holsopple: So these are not necessarily landscapes here in Frick Park. They’re an imagination, a culmination?
DS Kinsel: Yeah, they’re an amalgamation, things that are kind of collaged together or put together. I take a lot of pictures of the landscapes when I’m on long walks, and when I’m creating the works, I have all of the images up on the wall for me to reference, and I create a new landscape that’s inspired by the various places that I go to. You won’t find one of these fields directly in Frick Park, but you might see a section that gives you a memory of it, and these are basically all my memories.
Kara Holsopple: I read that The Long Walk poses the question, “How do we return to nature?” So what is your answer to that?
DS Kinsel: That is a thread that comes from the work that I’ve been making, probably over the last four or five years. It’s really about funerary practices, end-of-life practices, not only in our own culture, but cultures across the globe. I wanted to keep investigating that theme of death or funerary practices, but in a lighter way.
I often think about nature as a place of return. I love visiting my ancestors here in the cemeteries in the city. Our cemeteries and places of burial are really like public parks. They were created and built during a time when the cemetery was a place where you would visit, you would have a picnic. We spent way more time with our ancestors and it wasn’t weird or out of character, it was just another place of reflection. I was really inspired by that. I wanted to keep that theme within the work, but maybe approach it in a different way. During my travels, I have learned more about natural burials, indigenous burials. How do we physically return to nature and even at the end of life, how do you return to nature? Because we’re all going to return.
Kara Holsopple: What is your relationship with the outdoors?
DS Kinsel: I love the outdoors. I love being outside. I have to be outside or I’ll go crazy, actually. It’s the best thing for my mental health. Just watching nature is how I get a lot of my inspiration. Being a founder of BOOM Concepts, having a family, can be really overwhelming. Whenever I’m in nature, wherever I’m in my family, it just seems to really release and bring peace to us. It’s an essential part of my joy practice, my artistic practice, and my family life. I like to jump on logs with my kids, splash into creeks, and thankfully Pittsburgh has amazing parks and Frick Park is probably my favorite.
Kara Holsopple: What do you want people to take away from these pieces?
DS Kinsel: I want people to take away rest, relaxation, reflection. You know, when I think about the fields in Orquevaux, my favorite meadows in Frick Park, and even some places in New England that really inspired the show, it was always a peaceful time. It was a space where I felt at rest, I felt clear in mind. And I just wanted to bring that back to the artwork and for people to experience as well.
DS Kinsel is a multidisciplinary artist and creative entrepreneur based in Pittsburgh. His exhibit, “The Long Walk” at The Frick Environmental Center is on display through September 26th.
