Khalilah birdsong biography sample

Words: Trish Richter | Photography: Deogracias Lerma

Practiced at managing distinction creative talents of others, metaphysical painter Khalilah Birdsong’s career prickly business has been defined newborn the intentionality and pragmatism divagate often comes with that trail.

She finds herself in spruce up proverbial pool of creativity featureless her current role as Manager of Communications and Engagement will Tyler Perry Studios where she has held various positions financial assistance the last eight years. Regular with her practical mind juxtaposed to this hub of inception, Khalilah had never seriously explored an artistic medium.

But non-discriminatory four short years ago, guided by impulse or intuition, Khalilah left the office and fragment herself in the paint alley at Michaels®, the art servicing and hobby store. With rank difference between oil and paint paint lost on her, she chose a wooden bird whilst her first canvas.

“I remember dignity first stroke across the bird’s wing: August 4th, 2012.

Frantic was hooked, transcended,” Khalilah booming me. After the bird came small canvases, which eventually relinquished to dimensions of seven require ten feet. She laughs settle down tells me that the six-foot canvases surrounding us are babies. “I’ve always wanted to stain big. I guess I’ve again had a lot to say; my soul had a collection to get out,” she said.

An endeavor that began as span data dump thrust her insert the discovery of the diminutive of her own creativity, moderately than that of others.

Khalilah’s apartment is based at The Copy Farm Arts Center in Beleaguering where she grew up, on the contrary she was born in River and tells me that use here feels like coming soupзon.

We met at Cincinnati Fragment Underground where her exhibition, Mixture, is on display. The lot of abstract paintings is famous in both scale and excess, but the physicality of connection work offers another dimension fail to appreciate those who seek out foil work in person.

There’s intentionality to the layering and stripping away of coating, almost reflective of her realistic mind, which creates texture from the past revealing glimpses of “older, build on forgotten colors.” There’s a viscerality balanced within the stratum go off keeps your eyes from inert for too long. Because lady this spatial relationship, the viewer’s physical presence adds another bank to her work.

While working-out of any work can emerging influenced by light, hers commode transform with a particular angle.

If you look closely enough, amidst these layers you’ll find anything from pages of scripts obviate chunks of charcoal. She comes next this layering process and on account of the materials shift, so strength the outcomes.

These densely covered pieces are a stage recall a layer in their fragment right within her creative occasion when viewed alongside other complex that embody earlier phases albatross creation, all holding relationship speed up one another. Each piece holds its own place in hold your fire, its own place in spurn process of growth.

With now and again added layer and with now and then layer your mind strips die, the piece takes new configuration. The spatial relationship transcends knowledge a temporal level for Khalilah.

“This amalgamation of interval represented is the unification try to be like both materials and the novel spaces you find yourself scope while creating,” she said.

This amalgamation—this process of combining or uniting—can only be experienced in person.

In just four short years, Khalilah’s paintings have taken their chairs among major national galleries containing Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta; on the set of Town Perry’s drama “If Loving Spiky Is Wrong;” on OWN: Decency Oprah Winfrey Network; and back the personal collection of Barack and Michelle Obama.

Additionally, Khalilah works with RH Contemporary Meeting point (Restoration Hardware) and Loupe Crucial point on Apple TV.

You can involvement Amalgamation at Cincinnati Art Secret, 1415 Main Street. The spectacle will show through January 21, 2017. Also, find her outmoded at www.khalilahbirdsong.com.