Quinn's Ecstatic Color Spaces Are Magically Disorienting

Kristin Quinn: LUMINOUS FLUX; Paintings from the Watershed
On Exhibit at the Figge Art Museum - Davenport, Iowa through January 11, 2025

Hen’s teeth are rare enough. In painting, great colorists are even rarer. Kristin Quinn, is one of them.  She is now featured in a solo exhibit at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, with three dozen oil on masonite panel paintings and five dozen mixed media paper collages.

I met her before I met her work which, at the time, was virtually achromatic: brown against black; a different brown against a different black, rising to a mild crescendo with a mid-winter goldfinch greenish yellow, or a  muted Tuscan red.  Mind you, these were strong paintings on their own terms and I own two of them. She and I taught together for many years in the St. Ambrose University Art Department and I have had a front row seat from which to watch her painterly evolution.

Over time, Kristin has carefully, lovingly examined the flora, fauna and the geological structures that support them in the Midwest and beyond. Via this micro and macro examination, her palette has greatly expanded. Her largely abstracted landscapes have radio-activated with some of the most uplifting, even ecstatic color spaces imaginable. Coupled with a potent technical arsenal—paint applied, removed, abraded, layered, excavated, bruised, scumbled, kicked, yelled at and caressed, she manages to elicit the volcanic beginnings of our now blue-green earth and the panoply of specific hues found in feathers, flowers, clouds and waterways. 

Quinn utilizes a geologist’s knowledge (she owns and has used a special pick-axe for prying loose fossils), a passion for bird migration and diversity, a love of the strange pre-codified perspective structures of early southern Renaissance painting, and a willingness to push bulldog ugliness into triumphant beauty. Weather is a further fascination.

Strangely, for paintings amped up with the spectrum of chemical and natural colors available to today’s painter, and given the eye-popping and often unexpected adjacencies that make up each of her paintings, you can’t call them gaudy or garish. They are too carefully calibrated and too smartly calculated for that. Even the wildest Carnivale is subtly tied to natural experiences as perceived from an artist’s POV.  She often keeps the colors from blowing up and away by placing solid little visual paper weights on them—flocks of birds; tent and awning samples; windows into underground light shows, congregations of twigs and branches and small, windowless huts.

One of my favorite aspects of this body of work is the productive tug between the modernist flatness of the picture plane and the subtle depth cues that are snuck in. 

In Yellow River, Effigy Mounds,  (2023), against a swirl of massive swoops of paint, a set of black tree silhouettes converges upwards in an otherwise abstract flatness. Even the network of dots arrayed as if on a curving ribbon in Frozen Falls from this year belies the gorgeous colors stretched taut, like satin across a frame. This spatial inconsistency is magically disorienting and is in my experience unique to her work.

I challenge you to spend 5 minutes sorting through Flotsam from 2022. In that harmonious, twilit field, of warm, desaturated colors, there is a massive amount of pleasurable information woven into the many layers, sets of marks, opacities, translucencies and evidence of the broad variety of tools Quinn uses. Those five minutes will fly by and you’ll want to hang around to discover more visual treats, and appreciate the emotional places they’ll take you.

In addition to the paintings, there’s a small movable wall stuffed with elegant collages. These are not sketches for finished paintings. They seem to be imaginative warm-ups for the painting process and are complete and self-sufficient works in themselves. They incorporate much of the same massive vocabulary from the paintings but the addition of collaged elements has the effect of taking weight off the images, turning the calendar past summer and fall, and hovering among the new flowers and leaves of spring. Their weightlessness forms a fitting complement to the density of the paintings.

Somewhere in your viewing process, you’re bound to find surprising sweet spots—images that resonate viscerally. Like a subtle aroma surrounding a half-remembered experience, you’ll find yourself ransacking your past for the inexplicable connections. When a work of art evokes who and where you’ve been, and reflects your soul back to you, who could ask for more? The show continues through January 11, 2026.