Hi, I'm Kayleigh.

Artist Statement

“I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream, something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone…”

Edward Burne-Jones

On Perception

I am often called a realist, and I understand why. To an untrained eye, the label offers a convenient shorthand for the way I paint. Yet it has never felt true. My instincts have always pulled toward the beautiful, the mystical, the fanciful, and the ornamented, and the beauty I seek is most often found in the past.

I return again and again to the masters: Michelangelo and Leonardo for their reverence of the human form, Bouguereau for his luminous devotion to beauty, and Antonio López García for his patient, almost meditative act of looking. Each belonged to a moment that burned brightly and passed too quickly. History moves forward and leaves much behind, but what remains is not finished. It is an invitation. A line may still be extended, the way a calligrapher lets a single stroke unfurl into a flourish. A palette may still be enriched with colors the old masters never possessed. An inherited form may still carry a new idea. The world the classics described is gone, but through my own perception of it, it can be made present once more.

Photography continues to shape the way I see. Like the eye, the lens offers only a partial and fleeting account of the world, and I am drawn to what slips through it: the blur, the passing instant, the distance between what is seen and what is understood. The frame holds equal weight. Painting was once conceived as a window onto another reality, and I treat frame and image as a single, unified object. In this way the work becomes less a picture to be viewed and more an object to be encountered.

For these reasons, I cannot claim to be a realist. Reality is far too vast and too elusive to be captured. I consider myself instead a perceptual painter. I paint what is perceived, whether drawn from the world before me, from a photograph, from imagination, or from a memory of a past I never lived.

My hope is simple. I want the viewer to first be met with beauty, a quiet sense of pleasure and ease, and then, on looking closer, to be drawn into wonder and curiosity.