Yield, a painting by University of Texas at Dallas senior Kendall Miskimins began as a class assignment encouraging artists to incorporate technology into painting.
Miskimins, an Interdisciplinary Studies student focusing on visual arts, crafted the artwork during the Fall 2023 semester for Intermediate Painting (ARTS 3369), a course instructed by Lorraine Tady, a clinical associate professor at the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at UT Dallas.
“The way that I create my paintings is almost a meditation,” Miskimins said. “As my current Professor John Pomara says, while painting try not to use conscious thought process and let the art create itself. I also just love creating art and generating new pieces and new ideas.”
In Intermediate Painting, the task entailed contemplating the impact of technology on contemporary painting practices in our present era.
“Intermediate Painting does not advocate one stylistic approach, rather it encourages students towards critical thinking and developing their personal vision,” said Professor Tady. “Various artists, materials, tools, techniques, catalysts and concepts are shared to broaden student’s exploratory options and strengthen their unique manipulation of imagery and content in painting.”
For this artwork, Miskimins initiated with an original oil-on-canvas painting. Subsequently, she photographed the initial piece, opened it in Photoshop, and applied distortions to transform it into something entirely new.
“I played with things, like twisting it, and zooming it in 500 times, and enhanced and distorted all of the colors and all of the shapes,” Miskimins said. “I did a bunch of things to it to generate a new image. And then, from the Photoshop-generated image, I translated that onto a canvas and it created Yield.”
“Once I got the new image, I sat down at my easel with that image up in front of me,” she added. “And I didn’t follow it completely, but I definitely took a lot of heavy inspiration from it, and translating that onto canvas. At the end, I created something that was unfamiliar, even to me as the artist.”