Abstract Awareness Issue #37

Dana Louise Kirkpatrick paints for arts education

By Jessica Galliart
Published: September 1st, 2008 | 12:36am

Often created on inexpensive sheets of linen or whatever she can find abandoned in an alley, the sharp lines and quick strokes in Dana Louise Kirkpatrick’s work release an aura of childhood sketches combined with grown-up agony and disgust with society. Even the text in her pieces resembles a child’s scribbled handwriting.

Raised in a single-parent household that moved frequently, Los Angeles artist Kirkpatrick immersed herself in the arts when she was 5 years old. Without her crutch of expression through the arts, Kirkpatrick says she would have been “extremely lost” today. “Growing up is not easy,” she says. “To not have any way to express that, it’s a real disservice to young people.”

Both the need to fill a void in arts education for young people and her experiences with art at a young age have led Kirkpatrick to pursue humanitarian projects. “We wonder why the world is such a fucking mess, [but] it’s pretty simple to cut back to the fact that there’s not a voice being given to disenfranchised young people,” Kirkpatrick says.

Her most recent gig working on a benefit with Surfers Healing, a foundation for autism awareness, and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a nonprofit music education organization, was particularly personal. At the May 2008 event, she, along with photographer Michael Muller and several other artists, displayed her art made on surfboards, recycled wooden doors, and guitars to raise thousands of dollars for the two groups.

Kirkpatrick spent the summer of 2008 planning for a September exhibition in Cuba — and working to get her art and herself across the Gulf. “It’s not confirmed that I will, in body, be able to go to Cuba, which is totally unacceptable to me,” she says. “It’s important for artists to find the loopholes we can and continue to prove that artists can effectively reach others through music, arts, and film and prove that the political nonsense going on doesn’t successfully keep people apart.”

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