Instagram Pick of the Week | Eimear Kinsella
We love Instagram! Why? Because it gives you access to tonnes of visual art at your finger tips! Follow @thisheadstuff to stay up to date with our finds on our favourite app!
Every week HeadStuff’s Visual Arts Editor will feature posts from their favourite artists on Instagram. So add the hashtag #thisheadstuff to be featured!
Up this week is Eimear Kinsella aka @eimear_and_her_art an Irish designer living in Vancouver City. She is a Textile Design graduate from NCAD, who was awarded with the Student of the Year award on completion of her Bachelor of Design. Although her background training is largely hand crafting textiles, Eimear’s work has always been driven by science and how we can hand craft, create and design to influence science and vice versa. She also illustrates and creates children’s books, working for authors and also creating her own projects.
What is Instagram for you?
I only started using Instagram maybe three years ago. I only started my art Instagram page a month ago! I didn’t use my personal page for my art initially, I actually only got it because my sister said she would help me out with being a model for some paintings if I added her on Instagram. Then I interned in London with a textile fine artist called Anna Maltz who used Instagram every day to show her work and progress. She did an amazing job of creating a mood and aesthetic for her work and had a lot of people contacting her and following her work because of Instagram. So now, for me, I use Instagram for inspiration and to get my work out there. I find that having an account also keeps me on my toes and encourages me to photograph my art work and progress more. Because I am so bad for doing that!
Why/when did you decide to start sharing your work on there?
It was about three years ago when I would just take photos on my pretty awful camera phone and upload them. It was just work that I was doing at the time and kind of more arts and crafts projects. Then I realised that I could take better photos with a better camera and upload paintings and work I was making in terms of science and art and collaboration. To me it was really interesting to be making work to show people. I was pretty bad at showing my work and made a lot of it for myself and on a commission basis, but for the general public this was all new to me. I started my artist page only a month ago! I am living and working in Vancouver for over a year and my Instagram account was starting to show more photos of hikes and snow then my artwork – which is great! I enjoy when artists’ pages show you about the artist’s life too, but mine had become a collection of fancy dress nights out and train trips.
How would you describe your style?
My style is all over the place! I am a bit ridiculous when it comes to committing to a style or colour. With my bio-art encyclopedias I use a lot of close up photography. My work can be quite dark in it’s mood and also very clinical. I look for a lot of deep colours for my photos contrasting with clean whites and pastels. Then there is my painting style which has changed from acrylic to watercolour over the last five years. My watercolours also only use three base colours and then I go through phases of going heavy on turquoise or on violet. Then there are my illustrations which where originally just for cards I would make for family. I would make gifts of books for my relatives with poems in them and illustrations of their lives for special occasions. Then they just became popular and now I am doing little illustrations! Overall, I would describe my style as being very body influenced. My colours are very much about the skin and the internal body in it’s raw and basic form.
What equipment do you use?
Camera, watercolours, pen, pencil, watercolour paper. That is about it. For my textile work it completely depends on the project, so anything from dead animals, to cows tongues, to my own, my family’s and my friends’ faces. They are my tools.
Who has been or currently is an influence on you?
Lucy MaCrae is a huge influence on my work. She looks at the beauty in the idea of the post-human and collaborates with groups who inspire very imaginative design. Her creations are realistic and make the viewer question the information and potential reality of the piece. My love for painting and fine art always came from Caravaggio and Botticelli, very much from the early days of high school art. Looking at the work I produce, I think it is the colours that I have taken from their work and carried into my own more than the technique or media. I think currently I am very influenced by Dr. Seuss and David Lynch. I enjoy their work a lot and I think it has subconsciously made its way into my aesthetic.
What are your must-follow accounts on Instagram?
There are a few… @maruti_bitamin has the most beautiful watercolour images that are so delicate and breathtaking I could look at them for days. @paulabonet for her large scale paintings and her use of colour and shading; she is constantly working on something amazing. Print-maker @plasticyouth, Aaron Smyth, creates some of the most beautiful work I have ever seen. He is an incredibly skilled guy from Dublin whose prints show a beauty between body, strain and relations with other bodies. The skill in his drawings and his prints is in a league of its own.
What’s the best hashtag going and why?
I really don’t know. I always use #illustration these days. I also try to use #Irishart quite a bit. Mostly because it’s a hashtag that I like to search and look through because it’s always nice to see new work being produced at home. #watercolor (without the ‘u’) is also popular. I guess its because people have become really interested in watercolour tattoos and also with colouring books becoming popular and watercolours being an easy method to paint this colouring books. That’s my very basic analysis of the ‘watercolor’ hashtag!
