“For me, painting is world building.” Many storeys above Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, off a busy main road and above a sprawling storage facility, Debbi Kenote has invited me into the studio where she fashions her worlds out of wood, canvas, dye and acrylic paint. It is filled with interestingly-shaped paintings containing constellations of indeterminate forms, many of which find themselves cut off by their canvas’ slanted edge or sharp corner. “Things peek in and out, enter and exit,” she tells me, comparing the surface of a painting to the stage in a theatre show. “Things can feel too stiff if your viewfinder isn't capturing in a natural way.”
In Kenote’s case, the viewfinder is almost never a regular shape. Almost all of her canvases – for which she builds the stretchers herself – contain inlets, joins, gaps, points and hinges. You can do a lot in terms of describing her work without even mentioning paint, which raises a question about exactly when paintings become interesting; at what point should the process of making, or talking about, a painting begin? Whether buying them off-the-shelf or building them themselves, most painters take their substrates – the surfaces they paint on – for granted, submitting to the four corners that enclose their images and focusing solely on what exists between them. Kenote sees the physical shape of the substrate as the first decision a painter makes, whether they know it or not. This attitude, she says, might have something to do with her MFA in sculpture: “with sculpture, the first question is what material you’re using, followed by what shape it will command in space. When I graduated and began thinking of painting again, I saw the support of a painting as a fertile place for play.”
