Kim Foster Yardley

I make gestural portrait paintings, using a limited palette of oil paints. For several years now, I have painted self-portraits that lie somewhere between representation and abstraction. I repetitively paint my head, hair and shoulders. My features are often distorted with shadows of paint for the eyes, nose and mouth. The gestural brush strokes can appear frantic, dripping paint and layering with darks and lights, dragging along the surface and allowing paint to pool.

These works began as a warm up exercise on days at my studio but over time became a dialogue with myself. Would something be revealed to me or would the traces remain hidden? I was thinking about repair and identity but as I read more deeply, repair seemed a naive goal, assuming a resolved outcome for a state that is irreversible.

The right to opacity is the right to be unknowable and different. I exist within contradictory identities, within the present and past, the precarity of black experience. There are aspects to myself that are unknown even to myself. How do I reveal these aspects? Do I even desire to do so? At the same time this process brings to mind for me a kind of documentation, these quick self-portraits as an archive, a record of time passing. I am looking for what is within my identities, trying to capture traces, the “past not yet past, in the present”.