A Shadow Is An Object

Kristin Petrillo

Interview by L. Valena
March 4th, 2024

Can you please start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

I received an image that appeared to be a cyanotype. It was a square image, with a very geometric blue and white pattern, and it seemed to have stitching on it as well.

What were your first thoughts and feelings about that?

I got the email, and decided not to open it until I could look at it with full presence of mind. You read things according to your preferences, so when I opened it up, oddly the first thing I thought of was the skylight that you see in a stairwell in an older industrial building. Kind of an odd association, but let's just run with it. After looking at it for a while, I started to imagine how it was made, and became intrigued with the idea that sunlight itself was the creator of the piece.

Cool! What happened next?

In my own work, my obsession is sunlight on buildings, brick in particular. I started thinking about all of the photos I have; I work from a large archive of photos I have taken. I remembered one that I shot in November in Cambridge, and I remembered it being in a stairwell. I remember thinking it was kind of an odd place for me to take a photo -- usually I would be outdoors, not in a stairwell. I was able to find the photo, and started to dive into how I might transform it. The original image is pretty drab. It's mostly gray, but the sun is coming in pretty strong, and there were a lot of interesting forms.

I did what I usually do, which is a lot of exploration using Photoshop to manipulate the image, and to try different ways of pushing the underlying color. Initially, it’s not necessarily all that obvious what that color is. When I did that, I found that there was a lot of blue in the photo, which was a nice pairing with the prompt. Then I start to work on the composition. I printed out the image, cut it up, and tried to find the pieces of it that tell enough of the story of what the original image is. In this case, I didn't feel like I had to be all that explicit about it, since I was working from something that was totally abstract. That's where I started to get the idea that the shadow itself was the composition.

It's really cool to hear how you use Photoshop to prepare your reference material.

I use it to do a lot of exploration, which many people do in an analog way. I'm a graphic designer; I spend my whole day doing things like that, so it's always felt like a very natural extension of my thought process.

Tell me more about shadow. You said that sunlight is a major inspiration for you, where does shadow come into it?

Well, you can't have one without the other, they're two sides of the same coin. This was an interesting chance to dissect my own thinking. Typically, I'm really only thinking about the light, but none of that light has any power without the shadow. It's kind of obvious, in a way, but I hadn't articulated it for myself.

Do you feel like that opens up anything for you in the future? What does that mean for your practice?

I'm not really sure yet, in terms of imagery. Normally I paint on canvas, but for this project I wanted to paint in an efficient way and try a few things if I wasn't happy. It was a good chance to experiment with painting on paper, which I've been wanting to do. I did a few variations on different types of paper, and then settled on some hot press watercolor paper which really suited the way I apply paint (very thin and controlled). So that’s probably opened up some doors.

Can we talk more about the photography part of your practice?

I love a good walk, and a good urban walk specifically. Walking in the woods is nice, but walking in the city is, to me, far more interesting. I live in Worcester now, and previously lived in Boston and Waltham. In the city a lot of what you see around you is not what you would traditionally call beautiful. I got interested in narrowing the lens of what I was looking at, and finding interesting compositions within the greater noise of the urban environment. It never fails to surprise me how sunlight can transform something banal into something special.

I very rarely work from anybody's else's photos. A couple of times I have, but it seems that being in the space is a really important part of the process for me. It’s the only way to develop the sort of intimate relationship with the building or stairwell or sign or traffic cone or fire hydrant that I need in order to do the work. We dismiss a lot of potentially visually engaging things because they're just background.

Yeah, I think it's so interesting how the built environment becomes this language that we're all immersed in. It's like wallpaper that we just don't see.

Right, we don't actually see it. When I get in-person reactions to my work, people sometimes seem surprised that they find it interesting. Either they've already seen the building before, or they've never taken a moment to transform it in their mind. That's what I like to do with all of the color that I'm kind of over the top with sometimes. It’s another way to make you pay attention. It documents the buildings themselves, but I'm not as concerned with the truth of the moment. It's this idealized way of seeing the space.

Have buildings always been a source of fascination for you?

I've certainly been interested in the built environment for most of my adult life. And it's nice, my husband shares the same interests. We both went to design school, so we both have an eye on this. We go out and see these things together, and it's fun to compare our interpretations of the same setting. So where I might focus on a trash incinerator, he might have been zeroed in on something completely different. That has encouraged my interest, but I only started painting about six or seven years ago. So it's a fairly new endeavor for me.

That's so exciting! And you're a graphic designer as well, so that design part has been something you've been working with for a lot longer, right?

Yeah. I think that the impulse for composition comes out of that; if it doesn't have an intriguing composition, I'm not really interested in it. So that's where it diverts from documenting reality. Designing something, as opposed to making art, which I see as complimentary endeavors in this case. It's interesting to see what kind of emotion you can evoke with such a calculated approach, and I find you can a lot of the time. Sometimes you get the sense of a story that has happened, or is about to happen, and I think that's kind of magical. Our minds want to fill that in.

That's interesting, because it kind of flies in the face of a certain stereotype about art -- that it's messy, and comes from who knows where. But sometimes it's not like that at all, sometimes it's calculated and thought through.

Yes! It wasn't until I really gave myself permission to be the way I wanted to be about it that I really got into it. I had always wished to paint, and never took any painting classes, but figured that if I ever got around to it I would want to do something abstract and expressive. A lot of what I admire in other people's work is in no way natural to me.

I know what you mean. I have so much respect for abstract work, but that's just not how I'm wired. But all that being said, this piece you made is pretty abstract.

I do think this is a nice possible step. Other ways I thought about handling this, which I didn't end up doing because of time constraints, was to break up the image into many squares and make them larger. That way each one would potentially be its own composition, which really would have pushed it into the abstract. I think this reference image has a lot of potential for further exploration.

Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this for the first time?

Have a little fun, don't take yourself too seriously. Don't worry about the outcome as much as you can, and if it suits you, use it as a chance to do something a little bit differently than you might typically do.

Call Number: V91VA | V93VA.peA

Kristin Petrillo’s work examines the fleeting effects of light and shadow on form and color and how these elements can be harnessed to manipulate mood. Recent work explores how industrial architecture and uninhabited urban environments are transformed from banal to emotionally evocative by shifting to a point of view and color space different from daily experience. She explores these environments on foot, capturing images, then returns to her studio in Worcester, MA to digitally alter the photos before planning and executing the work in acrylics.