28 www.ReadMPM.com | www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.MountPleasantPodcast.com Focused Persistence Perseverance pays for local artist Christy Kinard carry meaning. I put details into my paintings that tie a place together, fragments that hold memory and connect the work to something real. Found materials bring their own story, and the work is richer because of what they have already lived through.” Studying the works of renowned artists is another constant source of inspiration for Kinard. “Georgia O’Keeffe proved a flower could be monumental. That fearlessness with scale stayed with me, but where her work is precise, mine is raw. Rauschenberg taught me anything can belong on a canvas. Basquiat showed me freedom on the surface. De Kooning gave me permission to be aggressive. Peter Max lives in my subconscious every time I paint a floral. All of those voices are in the work, but the final voice is mine.” For Kinard, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is when someone stands in front of her work and she can see the subject reach them. “Not just visually. Emotionally. That is why I do this.” The accomplishment Kinard is most proud of is "Focused Precision," a permanent installation at the new Hilton Head Island Airport. Incorporating 16 glass panels that are 16-by-28 feet, “Focused Precision” depicts a great blue heron in flight toward the Harbour Town Lighthouse. Over the 30-year span of Kinard’s career, her work has been featured in Southwest Art, Fine Art Connoisseur, The Post and Courier and Mount Pleasant Magazine. Her pieces hang in homes, hospitals and corporate headquarters, as well as in the aforementioned airport terminal. “But none of that is why I paint,” she said. “I paint because every piece is a conversation between me and a place I love. If it reaches someone else, that is the gift.” She concluded, “I built this career from nothing on a shoestring and endured years of hearing no before hearing yes. I kept painting anyway.” BY SARAH ROSE You can view her work at christykinard.com or follow @ christykinard on Instagram. After graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design and the Atlanta College of Art, Christy Kinard did something that scared her: she moved to London where she could visualize fine traditional and contemporary art hanging in the halls of institutions such as the Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery. Having studied those masterful works firsthand, she returned to her home state of Georgia, where she lived in Atlanta for the next 23 years before relocating to the Old Village in Mount Pleasant. Kinard said her work is inspired by the tension found between places, such as the golden hour of the marshes across the Lowcountry that she loved visiting as a child, the mountains in Cashiers, North Carolina, or a grey London sky over the Thames River. “Nature is my constant. The herons, the live oaks, the way light moves across water. I have been watching landscapes my whole life and they never stop revealing something.” She added, “Materials inspire me, too. Handmade paper with beautiful weight. Vintage fabric. Objects that
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