Horses appear beneath star-filled skies. Cowgirls test the limits of gravity. A longhorn reclines beside a picnic of watermelon and birthday cake. Kym Day’s meticulously rendered oil paintings are grounded in the visual language of the West, but the worlds she creates are anything but predictable.
For Day, a sixth-generation Texan, that tension between the observed and imagined is precisely the point. “I really wanted this sense of home. I’ve always loved anything Western, anything Texan.”
She grew up surrounded by art. Her mother, an artist herself, instilled a love of Western masters. Day went on to earn a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in sculpture from Clemson University. Now based in Greenville, South Carolina, she shows nationally, including galleries in Greenville, Jackson Hole and Steamboat Springs.
Leaving Texas at a young age shaped her work in a different way. Distance, however, changed her pespective. Memory supplied only part of the picture. Imagination supplied the rest. “It got more and more fantastical.”
Paintings often begin long before brush meets canvas. Day collects photographs of skies, horses, livestock, landscapes and people, sometimes keeping an image for years before discovering where it belongs. She builds her compositions digitally in Photoshop, changing scale and color, repositioning figures and even piecing together multiple photographic sources to create the precise posture of an animal. Only after the disparate elements convincingly occupy the same pictorial space does the composition move toward paint.
That exacting process allows Day to make the improbable appear plausible. The realism draws the viewer in; what she does with it prompts the second look. “I find utter joy in merging beauty with absurdity,” she says.
It took time for Day to fully trust that instinct. Her earlier work, she says, felt “a little lost” until she stopped worrying about “stuffy art world perception” and embraced the fantasy and play that interested her. Lo Mein Western, a series that emerged around that turning point, is still her favorite. “It embodies my sense of humor perfectly. It’s just so wacky. It makes you look twice.”
Future works promise to be just as unconventional: cowboys pulling espresso shots on the prairie as horses look on and extravagantly dressed cowgirls flying improbably through the air, although some, she admits, may actually be falling rather than leaping.
For Day, the West remains less a fixed place than an open-ended proposition.
Save the Date: Rocktoberfest Returns October 22
Kym Day’s Belated Birthday, a lounging longhorn beside a celebratory picnic, sets the tone for Texas Counter Fitters’ annual art and music festival.
Once a year, Texas Counter Fitters opens its Richardson showroom for Rocktoberfest, an evening of live music, immersive art and community outreach. Now in its fourth year, this year’s event has a Western vibe, with headliner The Wilder Blue’s genre-bending mix of country, folk-rock, bluegrass and Americana. Also on the lineup: Dallas singer-songwriter Angel White, known for his soulful, bluesy sound.
And then there’s the venue: 4.5 acres filled with more than 200,000 slabs of extraordinary stone. Not your typical concert backdrop, but all the more reason to reserve your spot now.
Thursday, October 22 | 5–10 p.m.
Texas Counter Fitters
909 N. Bowser Rd., Richardson
Register for Complimentary Tickets
