From Instagram to art world darling: The meteoric rise of Danielle Mckinney

(CNN) — Danielle Mckinney’s ladies are in a permanent state of relaxation.

They lounge alone on couches or in bed. They sleep. Some are playful — toying with a butterfly or eying a praying mantis. Others are naked and seemingly unaware of the viewer, cigarettes in hand and gazes soft.

The 43-year-old artist has been painting these women her whole life, she said. As a little girl, she painted little girls, too, but her subjects have aged as she has. In conversation, Mckinney refers to them singularly as her “lady,” and, taken together, the moody portraits reflect intimate moments of solitude and repose.

For years, however, these works were private endeavors by an artist who formally trained as a photographer and only painted on the side. They were never meant to see the world.

Now, a little over four years after first publicly posting her portraits on social media, Mckinney has become one of the art world’s buzziest painters. Prints of her work sell for thousands of dollars; late last year, she even did a collaboration with Dior. At a new exhibition, opening at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair in the Netherlands next month, the Alabama-born artist will debut nine works inspired by American realist Edward Hopper.

The success of recent years initially brought panic, she said. Now, she’s learned to get out of her own head.

“I asked myself, ‘If I didn’t have all the success, would I still be in my studio trying to make these ladies?’” Mckinney said. “And the answer is yes, because I’m so curious as to what’s going to happen on that canvas. Every day, I just want to know.”

How Covid-19 changed everything

While painting was one of Mckinney’s passions, she was a photographer by profession. Growing up, a camera was always her tool of choice, and she completed an MFA in photography at the Parsons School of Design in 2013. After graduating, she kept pursuing photography, contacting galleries and other establishments to publicize her art. She worked weddings. From the streets of New York or in parks, she’d photograph what she called “people in gestures,” because she was “fascinated by humanity and movement.” How do we connect with each other? What is personal space? If you touched another person, how would they react? These questions drove her practice.

That all changed in 2020. At the height of the pandemic, people became guarded. They wore masks. Mckinney couldn’t “see,” she said, and the idea of touching someone outside your circle — interactions her photography relied on — became a cardinal sin. Even taking a socially distanced portrait of a stranger on the street seemed like a thing of the past.

“The world changed in the way I was seeing it, so I couldn’t find joy there,” Mckinney recalled. “I was frustrated. I was extremely frustrated with my craft.”

Shut inside her New Jersey home, Mckinney hit a breaking point. She marched into the local Michaels arts and crafts store, bought some cheap canvases, turned her headphones on and hid away in her attic. And she couldn’t stop painting.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Mckinney said. “And that’s what the creative act does when you can take ‘you’ away.”

While she’d been trained in school to not publish work too casually (the art market is fueled by scarcity, after all), Mckinney decided to forgo her professors’ advice. She made an Instagram account and uploaded her paintings to her page. She figured, why not just put them out there?

“It wasn’t about, ‘Oh, I want to be in this big gallery.’ I just wanted to share,” she said. “I’m not formally trained as a painter but — for me — I like (the portraits). And even if nobody else does, I’m going to share them anyway.”

Piecemealing a painting

Four years in, Mckinney is still sharing. Almost all of her works feature dimly lit interiors — a product, perhaps, of Mckinney’s preference of starting with black canvases instead of white ones — and backgrounds dotted with vintage-style furniture, lamps and recreations of famous paintings. In one, her lady lies on the couch with a version of Pablo Picasso’s “Le Rêve” (“The Dream”) behind her; in another, she is flanked by Henri Matisse’s “Dance.”

Her work starts as a collage. As a child, she would cut figures out of magazines for hours, putting the women in little houses or buildings, she said. Her process is more or less the same now: Rather than painting from models, Mckinney Photoshops images of women and interiors that speak to her.

She finds inspiration everywhere: in magazines, old photographs and even on Pinterest. Usually, she’s most attracted to images of women from the mid-20th century — there’s a softness to them, she said. Their bodies are thicker, a little more natural, than the slim models of today.

Sometimes a specific model won’t appeal to her, but rather the shape of a leg will, or a head resting on a sofa. Or she’ll fall in love with an image of a Chinese lantern decorating a room, and pore over images to find inspiration for a woman to sleep on the bed beside it. Slowly but surely, Mckinney piecemeals the elements together.

But sometimes, it doesn’t quite work, and the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit. She’ll paint the interior beautifully, then the model on top, and something about the final product “doesn’t look right.”

“It’ll drive me mad sometimes,” she said.

No matter the painting, one thing is for certain: Mckinney’s ladies stay indoors. She’s tried painting them outside. Once she drafted a woman dipping her toe in a pond, but she scribbled over the work, destroying it before it saw the light of day.

She came to a conclusion: Maybe, her lady just doesn’t want to go outside.

As a self-professed “extreme homebody,” who hardly leaves the house except to go to the studio, Mckinney can relate. In some ways, painting her lady inside is just what’s familiar to her.

Even as the idea of lockdown becomes a distant memory, her work still reads as a testament to rest and one’s own abode. As all her ladies are Black, that element of the work might feel especially revolutionary for other Black women.

“I think it also spoke to … other Black women that had not seen themselves in an art historic context, or just in general, in a leisurely position. They’d never seen themselves in rest,” Mckinney said. “I know I didn’t see it, but I wasn’t setting off to do anything like that.”

Still transforming

When she first began work on her upcoming exhibit, Mckinney was, as she puts it, “nervous and scared.”

Hopper is a legend, she said. His use of light resembles that of a film noir and has inspired filmmakers, like Alfred Hitchcock. As a trained photographer, Mckinney was also enthralled by his work, particularly “Morning Sun,” in which a woman sits on the edge of a bed facing the window, her legs and face illuminated by the sunrise.

Mckinney shares Hopper’s affinity for still, private moments. Her newer work is filled with references to the American realist — shadows stretch across faces, light filters through blinds and voyeuristically peeks into homes.

“That’s something that is in all of those paintings, this idea of these figures in light, in color,” Mckinney said. “His use of green and turquoise — I really wanted to put that in these paintings.”

In other ways, her approach has changed since she started posting her paintings to Instagram. She’s been taking a class at the New Masters Academy, an online art school, to learn the pure painting techniques she was never taught.

As a result, her work has been transformed, Mckinney said. Her brush strokes are freer. She’s looser, less afraid of color. And she’s finally learned to mix paint, allowing her to move away from the green and dark tones that dominate her early work. The new paintings, she said, have a more whimsical quality.

“I feel like it’s going to really improve my work,” she said of the classes. “Anytime you’re enjoying something and learning, I feel like it communicates in the work.”

But as far as subject matter goes, Mckinney said she’s focused on her lady. She cares for each iteration deeply, admitting that her attachment to them might be a bit “kooky.” She still gets depressed when they sell and her lady leaves, even as she recognizes her portraits have come to represent universal feelings.

When asked about what those feelings might be, Mckinney paused.

“We all wear these masks when we go out in the world,” she explained. “We have to be all these things and say all these things.”

But at the end of the day, she said, we get to come home, close the door and find that private moment all to ourselves.

“That’s what I really try to capture in this beautiful solitude,” Mckinney said. “Some of the ladies are very tense in those moments with a cigarette, and then sometimes they’re asleep and beautiful. But those moments are theirs.”

That’s what Mckinney wants us all to have, she continued. Our own moments. For herself, too.

Mckinney’s new works will be showing at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s booth at the TEFAF Maastricht fair March 15-20.

Correction: Mckinney’s age was misstated in a previous version of this story.

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