ErinKelli Kilbane is a resident artist in Staten Island. Ms. Kilbane received a Bachelor's of Fine Arts from SUNY Purchase, with a concentration in painting and drawing and minor in art history. After graduation, she traveled through Italy to study the fundamental roots of traditional Italian landscape painting and architecture. It was during this time she donated her first international mural to the small town of Pisciotta, which lead to her founding her mural painting business, Wall Recall Murals. Her paintings can be seen across the tristate area as well as internationally. In addition to Kilbane's street art, her work has been exhibited in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Westchester, and many of Staten Island's institutions such as Snug Harbor, Staten Island Artist’s Building, and SI Arts Culture Lounge in the ferry terminal. She translates her passion for the arts by making it available to the public through teaching and event coordinating. Ms. Kilbane instructs painting and drawing in school classrooms, art institutions, as well as developing mobile “Paint & Sip” classes.
Artist Statement
ErinKelli considers herself primarily an expressionist figurative painter/drawer who exhibits an analytical and sculptural understanding to investigate anatomy. Abstract elements such as distortion, embellishment, variation of mark, and ambiguity are employed to accentuate significance and hierarchy within a piece. Her unique manipulation of mediums foster the translation of emotion. Each individual's manifestation depicts a capability in facilitating the eye to engage in the sense of touch.
Charcoal allows a linear, skeleton-like perception of mass, oils promote a more visceral discerning of textures and density. Watercolors offer a more indefinite method, leaving a great deal to the will of the medium, she allows their transparency and layers to hint at an idea. The application of these mechanisms enables a convictive sense of gravity encompassing a realm that could paradoxically be everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.
Often depicting herself contorted and exaggerated to fit within a piece's innate geometric enclosure, the subject material is sizable, pronounced, and controversial. She showcases intense personal toil whilst disclosing auras of eroticism, subsequently advocating awareness for deviance.
Concentration and emphasis on the legs and feet are reoccurring motifs prevalent in the work. The fascination derives from an intimate consciousness of body image and how societal ideals form cliches.
"I am increasingly more attentive to the concurrence between two sets of ideas: the duality of plans and the chaos that befalls them, along with the potential kinetic tension and depiction of movement embodied in an immobile entity. My work is the compilation and physical manifestation of a conversation with and about myself amidst my ideas, plans, awareness, perception, tangibility and the canvas. The actual painting process is my discovery of relationships amongst the controllable and uncontrollable. The resolution is ultimately indebted to how spontaneity of the moment effects my emotive expression, despite a predetermined strategy. Thus, a work could be ever changing based on my actions and the consequent reactions."