TEFAF MAASTRICHT 2025

IN LIGHT OF HOPPER

THE PAINTINGS OF DANIELLE MCKINNEY

A nude woman lies across a plush green sofa in Danielle Mckinney’s Lumen (2025). She draws one knee drawn up toward her chest, buries her head in crossed arms, and closes her eyes as a spare lamp casts a warm glow over the scene. The otherwise sparse interior emphasizes Mckinney’s deliberate handling of light: the lamp, situated on a lone end table—serves as the only source of light in the room, the sky presumably dark beyond the heavy green curtains. This single point of illumination—from the very right-hand side of the canvas—emits a soft glow over the central figure, highlighting her rosy cheeks, the side of her bare breast. The light from the lamp cuts a sharp, horizontal line across the wall near the top of the sofa and creates a stark, turquoise patch on the carpet while the rest of the room recedes into darkness. The effect is rather dramatic—cinematic, even—casting the figure in a moment of arrested narrative, caught amidst a story never to be revealed.

Mckinney was a photographer before she was a painter. She studied photography at the Atlanta College of Art and then at Parsons School of Design in New York. She has always painted, as well, but it was only during Covid-19, when her photography practice—which involved interacting directly with strangers in public spaces—became dangerous, that she began painting in earnest. Yet, even as Mckinney moved away from the camera, her painting practice remained inextricably tied to her formal training in photography. Mckinney paints in much the way one develops film: she primes her canvases with a black ground and her paintings emerge from the darkness much as film photographs develop in a darkroom. Photography also serves, frequently, as source material for her paintings, the artist collaging poses, facial expressions, furnishings, and spaces from a variety of images, making them into a cohesive whole on canvas.^[3]

From her photographic training, curator Paola Peleari notes, Mckinney also retained her instinct for composition: “The photographic eye,” Paleari writes, “is capable of a special kind of alchemy: to recognize the extraordinariness in ordinary moments and preserve them in their property before the flow of things inevitably undo them. Mckinney’s eye is undoubtedly photographic, and the power of her paintings lies in their ability to capture those moments of pause that would otherwise go unseen.”^[4] Her eye trained to locate fleeting moments with acute clarity, Mckinney produces genre scenes exceptional for their quiet intimacy, for their unapologetic embodiment of rest, of leisure, of repose.^[5] Sprawled across unmade beds, lounging in overstuffed armchairs, or splayed across the floor—in various states of undress—Mckinney’s figures smoke ruby-tipped cigarettes, read thick, hardcover books, gaze out windows just beyond view, and nap in piles of plush blankets. These paintings notably lack the unsettling sense of voyeurism one might expect from paintings of nude women at rest: these figures are either unaware of their own being watched—or they don’t care—basking, instead, in their own space, in their own moment of contentment.

Mckinney is not only a trained photographer, but an avid student of art history—an interest evident throughout her ever-expanding oeuvre. She frequently evokes many great painters of the Western canon: Zurbarán, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Chase, Matisse, and Hopper all echo through her imagery. At times, her engagement with art history also becomes even more explicit: on the walls of her intimate, domestic interiors, she renders faithful reproductions of famous works of art: Picasso’s Le Rêve (1932) and Blue Nude (1902), Canova’s Venus Victrix (1805–1808), Matisse’s La Danse (1910) and Blue Nude II (1952), and Manet’s Olympia (1963)—which, rather famously, borrows its composition from Titian Venus of Urbino (1538). Mckinney’s painting practice is defined, at least in part, by this devoted dialogue with art’s histories—with centuries of achievement in both painting and photography. As she works, Mckinney constantly looks to these painters, turning their images over in her mind’s eye as she puts brush to canvas to articulate her own vision.^[6]

Perhaps one of the most fruitful of Mckinney’s ongoing dialogues with art history is that with the work of the great “poet of light” Edward Hopper.^[7] Hopper’s work was, in fact, a starting point for Mckinney when she began painting in earnest. One of the earliest paintings Mckinney made was areimagination of Hopper’s rather famous Morning Sun of 1952.^[8] In the Hopper painting, a lone woman perches on a stiff bed, knees tucked up to her chest, gazing out an open window. Her skimpy pink nightgown bunches behind her, revealing the slight swell of her posterior. Beyond the window, we catch a row of roofs, blue sky above. There is something unsettling about looking at this image—the tension in the figure’s body, the preternatural straightness of her back, the unusual rigidity of the mattress and the linens. Perhaps art historian Linda Nochlin articulates it best:

“An atmosphere of hushed eroticism intersects with the imagery of isolation, with the nude or seminude figures viewed from the distanced vantage point of the voyeur rather than being identified with the act of viewing themselves. Windows and the shape of light from windows tend to lock the static figures into place, repeating the interior configurations rather than offering alternatives to them.”^[9]

Much ink has been spilled about the undercurrent of loneliness that runs throughout Hopper’s work—about what Nochlin termed the “imagery of alienation.”^[10] While Hopper often rejected the idea that he painted such profound isolation, the devices he employed time and again reinforce the viewer’s distance—both emotional and physical—from his figures. In Evening Wind (1921)—an early etching—Hopper depicted a nude woman alone in her bedroom. Something out the window—a sharp gust of wind, perhaps—has caught her attention and, in her surprise, she turns her back to the viewer. The interplay of light in the scene—captured, through heavy cross hatching contrasted with areas where the plate has been wiped completely clean—heightens the tension, serving to lock the figure into the shallow space between the bed and the window. For art historian and Hopper biographer Gail Levin, Hopper’s early etchings—with which he found acclaim well before he did with his paintings—anticipate what will come in his later work. “In his etchings,” Levin writes, “Hopper developed and sharpened his ability to portray the lonely woman in an urban interior. In some the figure was nude, conveying with intensity a profound sense of intimacy and making the viewer assume the voyeur.”^[11]

In his mature paintings, Hopper’s subjects become less specific, but the emotional resonance of this isolation remains.^[12] Levin notes that some of the sense of loneliness we identify in Hopper derives, in part, from emotional projection on the part of viewers. “The levels of meaning in Hopper’s etchings,” she writes, “depend in part on the projections which various viewers make in confrontation with his imagery. They are often ambiguous situations with several possible interpretations.”^[13] It’s possible, then, to understand these Hopper’s figures as either isolated or enjoying their solitude. Peter Schjeldahl, the late New Yorker art critic—writing in June 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—echoes Levin: “The visual bard,” he wrote, “of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance.”^[14]

Whether Hopper’s figures are content in their solitude or anxious in their alienation, Hopper distances his figures by his very use of light, of architecture, of space. As Nochlin writes:
“An atmosphere of hushed eroticism intersects with the imagery of isolation, with the nude or seminude figures viewed from the distanced vantage point of the voyeur rather than being identified with the act of viewing themselves. Windows and the shape of light from windows tend to lock the static figures into place.”^[15] Hopper holds his figures still in these spaces, trapping them within the settings he has built for them, sentencing them to this solitude.

It’s notable that Mckinney began painting during the height of the pandemic—echoing, perhaps, Schjeldahl’s invocation of Hopper in that same moment. It is notable, too, that Mckinney—in painting her own moment of solitude—draws so much on the influence of Hopper. Like Hopper, Mckinney uses light to great effect—to heighten drama, to emphasize the solitude of her figures. Most critically, both painters use this light to invite the viewer to imagine themselves in the place of their subjects, to empathize with these women: “...in painting after painting,” cultural critic Olivia Laing wrote in their 2016 book The Lonely City, “[Hopper] shows not just what loneliness looks like but also how it feels, communicating with his blank walls and open windows a simulacrum of its paranoid architecture, the way it functions to simultaneously entrap and expose.”^[16] Mckinney, too, invites viewers to emotionally identify with her figures: “I like to keep the room empty,” the artist says, “so you, the viewer, can enter, have a seat, watch, call it your home…I like empty space, natural light. It allows for thoughts to become form.”^[17]

Yet, where the light of Hopper’s paintings withholds, where he erects a barrier between the viewer and the viewed, where he invokes the alienation brought on by world war and by the very nature of modern life—Mckinney’s paintings embrace the viewer, inviting us in. Hopper, Schjeldahl wrote, “leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back.”^[18] Mckinney, entering in this moment alone, allows us to breathe again—asking us to take a deep, steadying breath, to exhale that which weighs on us, to ground ourselves alone before we head back out into the world.