KAETLYN WILCOX

"I use a variety of water-based media on paper and wood panel to create mysterious, open-ended narrative paintings. In these images, natural and man-made worlds are strangely and intricately intertwined. People encounter tangled forests of tree-size beanstalks growing up out of finely wrought birdcages. Enormous animals burrow under tree-lined New England streets. Women transform into wild birds, and bird-headed people appear, matter-of-factly, dressed in their Sunday best.

Stories, pictures and memories inspire my work. I find my subject matter everywhere, from old photographs, vintage fabrics and field guides to epic poems and outdoor equipment catalogues. Bits and pieces of personal history appear in my paintings in various symbolic guises, and in images derived from vacation snapshots, family albums and memories that I reenact in staged photographs.

I use materials and paint in a style reminiscent of children’s illustration, a language in which narratives have limitless magical, absurd and nostalgic potential. There is an aspect of the mad scientist in my process, combining months of careful research, planning and detail, with wild, impulsive experimentation. It is important to me that when I begin a painting I have no idea how it will turn out. I use a number of tricks to combat predictability: investing tremendous amounts of time and energy in unresolved, potentially irresolvable, compositions, and choosing subjects that stretch the limits of my representational skills. In every painting I reach a point where failure seems imminent. The process of rescuing the image, of turning the disaster around, yields the most exciting and surprising parts of my work. "

Kaetlyn Wilcox was born in 1978 and raised in Wayland, Massachusetts. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Wellesley College in 2001 with honors in Studio Art and went on to study painting and drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, where she earned her MFA in 2004. In her graduate thesis exhibition, entitled Peter Rabbit Meets the Pink Prom Dress, Wilcox combined elements of painting, drawing and installation to explore themes of innocence, disillusionment, identity, desire and repression. Today, Wilcox continues to explore these themes in her gouache, watercolor and graphite works on paper. Her subject matter derives from fairy tales, myths, children’s stories, historical writings, nature publications, field guides and found domestic photography. In addition to teaching, Kaetlyn is currently branching out into the world of book illustration.

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