Kathy Yancey

 

All my life my work has looked like me. I have work that I have created over my entire life. My work is autobiographical narratives – using myself to paint about life and loss and love. I have used finding my Prince Charming (I married my husband John at age 19 and took my childhood drawings with me), traveling all over the world, giving birth, getting to know the people who were born to me, dealing with my own life’s travails (miscarriages, mother’s death) and surviving my own serious brush with death as the evolving subject of my work. I paint from the female perspective because it became a way to resist cultural authority and have my own say. Twenty-five of my childhood drawings were exhibited as the centerpiece of the first Biennial of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in 2001. Since then they have been exhibited several times in the Southeast. In many ways the creation of this early work was a self therapy to help me survive the death of my mother when I was very young. In my early work I began hot housing the expression of myself by finding a way to imbue my work with the emotion that inspired it. To this day I feel that my best work accomplishes this. I’m an intimist striving to make the personal relevant – telling the story of women through my own.

Copyright 2018, Kathy Yancey. All rights reserved.