My name is Ky McDonald and I am an oil painter/mixed media artist based out of Minneapolis, MN. From an early age, I took interest in the therapeutic effects of art making. Now more than ever, I prefer to work intuitively because it makes the art making process more playful and unpredictable. Throughout the past 10 years, I have found balance in teaching art in public schools and also working as an artist. My youngest students have taught me that process and imagination are what make art-making meaningful. For me, the process of making art becomes a journey through wrong turns, dead ends, and unexpected surprises, only to finally end at a destination that is uniquely your own artistic voice.
The idea of “finding your artistic voice” was a catalyst that got me into a regular art practice at the age of 30. I embraced the same processes that I watched my young students engage in when they made art- failure, experimentation, and mistakes. This process led me closer to an original aesthetic. I believe that the ideal way to find your artistic voice is to keep making art on a daily basis, paying attention to your brush strokes, color palette, and composition. After 1000 terrible brush strokes, cliche color palettes, and stagnant compositions, you will begin to reveal, through practice and failure, your creative voice.
Dark beauty and mystery is a reoccurring theme throughout my work. Beauty is powerful, but it is also dramatic, bewildering, and cryptic. Through my subject matter and my painting process, I look to emphasize the shadows of beauty and the mysteries that it holds. I strive to capture the ambiguity within in an image, igniting its mystery with the use of layered paint, heavy shadows, and vertical bars.
I am represented by Art Girls Minneapolis. Together with Art Girls, I have had the opportunity to display my work in various creative spaces and galleries around the Twin Cities. My work has been featured in Edina Magazine, Lake Society Magazine, Lake Minnetonka Magazine, London Paint Club, and Studio Visit Magazine.