Everyone, in one way or another, wants to explore the world. What that exploration means is different, of course, to every person – both in scope and in scale.
As an artist, Maya Kabat is vast and adventurous explorer, using two different mediums – paintings and mixed media – to examine the world she perceives around her. This results in varied, fascinating work; layered in concept and construction; colors that shift like sunset reflected on water or within the depths of clouds.
“My paintings and mixed media work evolve from very different places and fill different needs I have as a person and as an artist,” Kabat says.
Her paintings are large and lovely, overlaps of texture and palette that feed one another.
“My paintings are very physical and my whole body is involved with massaging a painting into being. For me, painting is very much like playing sports. I’m playing and collaborating with the paint and responding and moving with the flow of the piece. I’m trying things and then backing off. I’ll pull paint off if it’s not working.”
She notes that when she plays sports she’s interested in the beauty of the game, not winning or losing; she follows the flow.
“I’m interested in…the timing and flow of everything, and the feeling of having a body in space that moves and moves beautifully when everything is right. It takes practice, but it’s the potential for beauty the drives me back to the court or field. My painting is similar as I’m very much in collaboration with the paint; the color, the shapes, the textures, and the structures. All of these things are driving me as I go, and I’m moving and engaged physically and responding to it all in the moment. Sometimes you hit it just right and sometimes you don’t! But the potential for beauty drives me along and drives my desire to practice painting.”
There is a fierceness and a sense of intrinsic movement, shifts of light as it were within her paintings. They are bold and deep. Her mixed media work is more delicate, even transitory.
“My mixed media work on paper evolved from my need to draw and explore language – for me holding a pencil is inseparable from writing – and to explore other materials, and conceptual ideas. I work in series, and each series has lasted about 6 months,” she relates.
Her mixed media pieces seem measured, studied, and very much tell stories, even if they are mysterious tales to the viewer, who is invited to create their own meaning from them.
“In my mixed media drawing practice I’ve explored botanical themes, sickness – I was very ill for a period in my early 40s, binary code, war and the physics of time and space. Right now I’m exploring imagery derived from my trips to the Arctic, and another series about gender relations.”
She works with a wide variety of techniques and uses materials that range from stencil to water based paints, to acrylic pens to playing with freezing and melting ink.
“Working on paper is more flexible and transportable and so I’ll bring this work on trips and residencies where I could never bring oil paints. The dry time that oil paints require is so limiting. So the drawing/mixed media practice allows for me to digest lots of materials and ideas and conceptual themes. My oil painting on canvas is really one long, ongoing and evolving series.”
Her work has an overriding feeling of perfectly planned geometry, combined with a truly spiritual quality that Kabat says is intentional.
“The painting process for me is very much about the physical nature of being a human being. We are human beings with minds, eyes and bodies. I feel that the haptic nature of our reality is really being subverted right now with our cultural obsession with screens. Our minds and eyes are stimulated incessantly while our bodies lie dormant.”
In a sense, Kabat’s work is exploring not just the world around her and the viewer, but the world inside us.
“Spiritually, there is a connection with touch and our bodies that’s being ignored and lost. That’s why I meditate and do yoga and play sports and paint – so I can get out of my head and into my body. My paintings with their thick, visceral textures and pushing and pulling spaces are intended to be viewed with the eyes, but also felt with body. I really hope that people don’t just look at my work, but really feel it as well. The sculptural nature of my painting is hard to see in photographs, but it’s essential to the work.”
There is a quality to her work which makes viewers want to dive into them, to touch them at least metaphorically; their textures seem real, as real as water, light, sand, soil. She’s conceptulaized and created the techniques to shape her aesthetic based at least initially on her interest in texture.
“I was a knitter as a child and quilted,” she notes, explaining that she attened UC Davis for textiles and received an MFA in fiber. But despite that, she gravitated to painting “for the speed and immediacy it offered; again, like sports, speed and immediacy are essential to my creative process,” she asserts.
When she couldn’t build the kind of texture that truly interested her from using brushes, she turned to other tools, eventually discovering the scraping tools intended for laying drywall compound.
“The tools changed everything from that point on: the movement of the tool and learning how to wield it to create lines, slabs and textures drove the development of the work from there. Compositionally, my interest in quilts and quilt makers like the improvisational quilt makers from Gees Bend always provided inspiration, as did artists like Richard Diebenkorn. Trips to Iceland, Greenland, and Machu Picchu also have had a big influence on my work and vision.”
Her color palette is also highly experiental, vivid and alive, what she describes as a push and pull of color. “I think that push and pull of color and form in space expresses another way we relate to the world, and the landscapes that surround us, with our bodies, not just our minds and eyes,” she explains. “When I was in Eastern Greenland on a boat sailing through the fjords and surrounded by icebergs and glaciers, scale and perspective were all askew. Since there were no typical scale markers like buildings or trees in that landscape, your only context is your own body in relation to the objects around you and it’s very disorienting.”
She found it was difficult to tell the size of an object if she couldn’t tell how far away it was.
“It’s exhilarating and powerful to feel like your body is so out of context, and it forces you to question your experience in the world in a very existential way, and to question your body in relationship to the landscape in a way we often take for granted. It’s very profound and overwhelming to be confronted by a glacier.”
Kabat says that she’s trying to recreate that sense in her work, pulling viewers into the works, and recreating the intricate dynamics of body, scale and space.
As to her use of color itself, she calls her work in that area evolving. “Mostly I’m trying to find interesting and unexpected combinations of colors. I think unexpected color combinations help us think differently; to see things with fresh eyes and maybe to open our minds to new possibilities. Each new series of paintings seem to require a different set of rules with regard to color. Every time I get comfortable I try and toss it all up and engage with new ideas…”
To truly experience the colors, textures, and the physical and emotional depths of Kabat’s work, she wants viewers to experience it first hand. “In this age of computers I think we really miss out on the direct experience of art. It really does need to been seen and experienced first hand to be fully understood and appreciated,” she stresses.
And viewers will may have a chance to do so soon. In the past year, she moved from a residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New York to LA’s StArt Up art fair in LA in Venice, exhibiting around the Los Angeles area at a variety of galleries over the summer. “In November one of my binary code drawings will be in a show at Root Division in San Francisco, 140 Characters, curated by Margaret Timbrell and Lauren Etchells. Next year I’ll have a show at SLATE Contemporary, my gallery in Oakland, and also at The Sam And Adele Golden Foundation Gallery in New Berlin, New York.” She will undoubtedly show again in the LA area, too.
And when she does – that will be the time to take a dive inside her work, to feel the shifts in her work, much as the tides shift, or metamorphic rock forms. You can see photographs of the outcomes of course, but being there to experience it, to explore the world – that’s the best of all.
- Genie Davis, photos provided by Maya Kabat