T Magazine | Danielle Mckinney Never Thought Her Paintings Would Be Seen Like This

February 17, 2024

BY M.H. MILLER

 

The subjects of Danielle Mckinney’s paintings are exclusively Black women, like the artist herself. They are generally posed inside darkly lit but nevertheless inviting domestic spaces. The effect is both casual and courtly: Her women lounge on couches and read magazines. They smoke gracefully but with what Mckinney, 42, described as “a worldly tension.” In person, she shares a kind of understated glamour with her subjects, and she paints the act of smoking with nostalgia and envy. She started smoking when she was 13; when I first visited her Jersey City, N.J., studio last April, she was trying not to fall off the wagon. “After the last one, it’s been 70 days,” she said. “But I had two in between there.”

 

Her paintings are small and, as more and more people have seen them — something that’s been known to make other painters’ work expand in tandem with their egos — they’ve only gotten smaller, often not much larger than a sheet of notebook paper. She uses a richly textured oil, a more stubborn material than acrylic, which dries faster and is easier to control. And whereas most painters favor white gesso to prepare a canvas, Mckinney chooses an almost counterintuitive layer of black. Her figures seem to emerge out of shadows, like a photograph being developed.

 

Being in this kind of demand is untested territory for Mckinney. When 2020 began, she was living in New Jersey, just on the other side of the Holland Tunnel from New York City, with her husband, Robert Roest, who’s Dutch and also a painter, and working full time as a manager of course planning in the architecture program at the Parsons School of Design in Lower Manhattan. Seven years earlier, Mckinney had completed an M.F.A. in photography at Parsons, a degree for which she was still paying off loans. Her mother gave Mckinney her first camera when she was 15. Her art, she’d say, was about “watching people look.” She shot one series during her morning commute, asking fellow subway riders if she could touch them, and photographing their reactions.

 

But once the city went into Covid-19 lockdown in March of that year, she no longer had a morning commute. Everyone was wearing masks and, as she put it, “personal space became something so sacred.” Her old way of making art wouldn’t work anymore. “I was watching the world, but the world shifted,” she said. “I couldn’t enter it the way that I did before.” She found herself painting more, which she’d done off and on since she was a girl. (Her grandmother had encouraged this activity.) She’d always enjoyed it, though it was more like a diary: “Something I just did from the soul of my heart,” she said. But in that strange first year of the pandemic, when it felt like the world could end at any moment, Mckinney thought, “Why not show my paintings? Who cares?” She made an Instagram account and started posting. She sent emails to dealers — sometimes as many as 20 a day — but her expectations were low.