Welcome back to ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists.

My guest today is Kyle Staver. A figurative painter who draws on mythological and folkloric traditions, reworking familiar stories with her distinctive use of color and shadow.

Staver earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University. She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, and was previously awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Half Gallery, Zürcher Gallery, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, among others, with work in collections including the National Academy of Design, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The McEvoy Foundation.

On today’s episode I sit down with Kyle Staver in her studio to talk about some of the personal rituals that drive her work. We explore her early morning practice of redrawing yesterday's painting, the surprising pandemic experiment that led her husband Tom, to start her new canvases for her, and her philosophy around artistic collaboration and ego. Kyle shares how she approaches figurative painting without falling into creative ruts, her thoughts on contemporary relevance versus personal engagement, and her strict compositional rules about canvas edges. We talk scale, color and light, American goddesses and the circus.

This episode is jam-packed with helpful information and charm. And it’s a two-parter! Enjoy my conversation with Kyle Staver.

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If you have an any questions you want answered, write in to [email protected]
 
host: Isaac Mann
www.isaacmann.com
insta: @isaac.mann

guest: Kyle Staver
www.kylestaver.com
insta: @kylestaver

Thank you as always to ARRN, the Detroit-based artist and instrumentalist, for the music.