Artist Lecture: Kyle Saver

Image source: www.kylestaver.com

I know you’re not supposed to judge something by its cover, but that’s exactly what I did going into Kyle Staver’s talk. I saw the posters around the PCAC that announced her talk and I wasn’t really interested just by looking at the photograph of her painting that was on the poster.

She began her presentation with an “artist statement”-- it’s not really an artist statement but it is the writing piece that she submitted in her application for a grant. The statement was not talking about her work, but rather talked about what painting meant to her. I thought it was a good way to start because the fact that she didn’t write an artist statement like she was supposed to made me interested in her personality.

The slideshows she had up were not in chronological order, nor were they grouped into series, which was a little bit confusing. When people asked her about her work, I liked that she took some time to think about her answers and gave us a raw response, meaning it did not sound like she rehearsed it 500 times. She seemed scatter-brained, which put me at ease because I’m pretty scatter-brained myself when it comes to talking about my work-- and still, UNH faculty invited her to come speak.

Throughout the talk, I became more interested about her process as a painter and about her personality, and those two things together made her paintings more interesting to me.