Aura publishes artist spotlights to provide readers with the opportunity to get to know the authors and artists published in Vol. 48 Issue No. 1 of Aura Literary Arts Review. In this artist spotlight article, we introduce Kaitlyn Avery and Rich Glinnen…
Kaitlyn Avery is a senior at University of Alabama at Birmingham pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting. She has been committed to art as far back as middle school. In high school she was president of the National Art Honors Society and participated in numerous student art shows, winning First Place for painting in the Visual Arts Achievement Program at the University of Montevallo. In college she has been accepted four times into the Juried Annual Art Show, interned at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts and had artwork published in both the 2021 edition of the Vulcan Historical Review. Avery concentrates on figure painting, focusing on human relations and psychology. During her time at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she has explored larger scale paintings to create monumental and grand pieces. After graduation, Avery hopes to continue her studies in painting through a Masters of Fine Art.
Using oil paint, graphite and pen, Kaitlyn aims to create an intimate view of the figure. Her subjects exist in their own space, often in rooms or atmospheres that appear to be dreamlike. While she remains interested in a type of realism, Kaitlyn utilizes bold mark-making and brushstrokes, allowing the medium to become a part of the subject as well.
Kaitlyn’s work focuses on human relationships,
which include intimacy, self-perception, and spirituality. Many of her paintings and drawings are self-portraits or are of people close to her. She views portraiture as an opportunity and challenge to explore and understand the person better, to capture a part of their character that a photo cannot. While in high school she became aware of a series of works by the contemporary painters Cara Thayer and Louie Van Patten. The series was full of skin and close-up shots of people pressed together; she could feel the physical touch of the figures through the image and the way they handled paint was just as visceral. Later, she fell in love with the work of Jenny Saville and Francis Bacon. Although their styles are quite different from her own, she tries to capture the same level of emotion and impact that is apparent in their work.
Kaitlyn’s work in the past 4 years has focused on relational concepts, such as how we view one another and our own self-identity. As she has grown in her art, she has started focusing more on the self and on her own difficulties with dissociation. The way we perceive ourselves can never be authenticated, and that perception is always changing and morphing into other beings. Kaitlyn’s main goal in creating art is to provoke viewers to analyze their own sense of self and question the world around them.
Best of the Net nominee, Rich Glinnen, enjoys bowling and
eating his daughter’s cheeks at his home in Bayside, NY. His work can be read in various print and online journals, as well as on his Tumblr and Instagram pages. His wife calls him Ho-ho.
Rich has been writing for most of his life, so he’s had various influences and, therefore, trends in his work. The earliest he can recall would be Edgar Allan Poe and Roger Waters. Probably the first time these chaps were ever mentioned in the same sentence! He acknowledges that he was a dark and somewhat depressed adolescent, and Poe and Pink Floyd were good company to alleviate the isolation that he felt. Then, as he got older and coped with these feelings with sex, drugs and alcohol, the Beats and Bukowski became more relevant to him.
So, he was a cigarette-smoking boozehound and decided he would be a drunk poet forever, and only care about drinking and writing. That is, until he met his wife. Then his work, still grounded in debauchery, developed a more romantic, homey feel to it, sort of. I-like-getting-stoned-all-the-time-with-my-love-and-cats-and-live-simply sort of deal. Gushy, but not nearly as erotic.
Now, three years sober and a father, it’s hard to say who inspires Rich. There’s hardly time to read. He gets twenty minutes a day if he’s lucky. Surely, Billy Collins. Hal Sirowitz is amazing. Louis C.K.— his jam. Have you ever read Donna Tartt? The Goldfinch is top 5 for him. His current writing focuses more on the baby and being a dad, but also just whatever happens. Rich has gotten a great deal of pleasure in finding the beauty and humor in the mundane. For instance, he recently wrote a poem about finishing the peanut butter. Below is his poem featured in Aura:
When Today Feels Like Yesterday
By Rich Glinnen
You will be drinking water
And other things not formula
All by yourself—a master
Of the two-handed tilt—
When today feels like yesterday.
When today feels like yesterday,
But isn’t yesterday by a bunch,
You will be incredibly old,
Quantifiable only by years,
Whole milk crates of months,
Which is one of those things
You will drink some day
When all the current milk’s been curdled
Or consumed by relics like myself
At a dusky kitchen table,
Thinking about this today
On the forefront of my mind’s shelf,
Glowing with preservatives,
Never to expire,
With a milk mustache bleached
By the white one beneath.
