Kaylie Pendleton: A Bright New Age of Traditional Portraiture | Artist Interview
“What I imagine in fifty years is a little girl in a museum who sees a painting in a museum and sees her soul in it, and it’s for her. That’s who I am painting for - young girls who haven’t seen themselves in the museums” - Kaylie Pendleton
Kaylie Pendleton smiles at me in her cozy studio. Everything around us is covered in oil paintings, women’s portraits mainly. They look through me on the walls and from the floor, and I cannot take my eyes off the captivating color palettes.
Kaylie has been interested in art for her entire life. After taking college-level art classes in high school, she went on to study illustration in college in Portland, Oregon, and then transferred to fine art and painting. Portland turned out to be too secluded for the artist, and she moved to New York. Looking bitterly at developments in AI, and seeing so many creatives around her, she decided that was the perfect moment to get back to traditional art. “This is the place to do it”, Kaylie smiles about NYC.
Painting is Kaylie's medium of choice. Since she comes from an extensive digital art background, I wonder about what’s so special about painting specifically that could not be achieved with, for example, photography. First of all, the people in her paintings are not anyone in particular. Kaylie uses her extensive experience working with reference images to produce portraits of feelings and emotions rather than specific people. She combines reference images, personal photographs, and imagination to create dreamy and blurry portraits of strangers, which allows the artist to connect more personally with the painted figures. “Photography has limits, and its limits are something I like to explore with my paintings”. Oil painting allows Kaylie to capture the essence of what she is trying to convey without unnecessary details; the colors in her artworks are intense, and the signature blur creates a movement and almost a sense of anonymity within the pieces. While Kaylie still does digital illustration for commercial projects and acknowledges some of its advantages, she has a strong preference. “Painting is where I find my inner self the most”.
Weight of Reflection, Oil on Canvas, 24×30 Inches, 2025
Making paintings for women by women is a concept that Kaylie thinks about actively. “What I imagine in fifty years is a little girl in a museum who sees a painting and sees her soul in it, and it’s for her. That’s who I am painting for - bold young girls who haven’t seen themselves in the museums”. Kaylie loves when her paintings evoke personal responses from different people, and she believes that her audience who would relate to them on a deeper, more personal level would be women. Intersectional feminism has always been a major part of Kaylie’s life: she recalled strong women in her family, deep friendships with women, and studying feminist theory influencing her thinking and her creative journey. When asked about who, out of the famous women she would paint a portrait of with a chance of giving it to her, Kaylie suggested Virginia Wolf. “Her writing is so introspective. Her work is a stream of consciousness, so I would like to see how that would translate into my painting”.
Kaylie has been recently exploring the themes of dissociation and depersonalization. She describes her art as figurative paintings of women that are either altered, blurred, or stretched, in which she tries to evoke emotion and memory through the vivid colors and movement. Her recent paintings feature “doubling” of the figures as Kaylie explores her personal experiences with feeling distant and unreal. “Color is a major part of my work because I have a prosthetic eye, so I don’t have depth perception. I rely on color and light to go through the world, so the colors in my work reflect how I see”. Kaylie highlighted that the color is what separates her works from the real world and helps it be less detailed. She compared her color choices to the auras or energies. “I love to watch people in NYC, but I am less interested in capturing their exact place and time and more of their essence”, Kaylie shared, and I had to ask what color her aura was. While her recent self-portrait from 2025 is done in colder purples and blues, Kaylie suggested pinks and oranges.
Soul Separation, Oil on Canvas, 24×36 Inches, 2026
Movement is a big part of Kaylie’s paintings too. She was an ice skater and aerialist dancer growing up, and she tries to capture the feeling of movement in her blurry technique. “This is the first period in art when painting can actually be inspired by modern photography, and not the other way around”, Kaylie explained, referring to her research for the technique she’s working with. She compared the dizzy feeling she tries to capture with the world going around when you are driving by in a fast car or are in a dark space. Kaylie highlights the feminist lens that she is using to portray the theme: women are taught to see themselves through a gaze, which adds to the derealization aspect of being perceived all the time.
When talking about inspirations, Kaylie highlights that she takes a lot from within herself. She feels that her creative process is an introspective practice, but some of the outside influences for her include sunsets and the ocean. “My version of touching grass is seeing water”, she laughs. The artist shared that growing up next to the ocean had an impact on her subconscious, and it is now, combined with the sunsets’ color schemes, is reflected in her artistic choices. “Each of my work consists of my previous work”.
Still Spinning, Oil on Canvas, 24×36 Inches, 2026
The feeling about the future in the studio is positive. “I love that now you can be a ‘woman artist’ and an ‘artist’, where one is not seen as a downgrade of another”. Kaylie is an independent woman artist in her twenties, and she is looking forward to the art world changing as we speak. “I often try to be positive as a rebellion”, shares Kaylie. She refuses to be put in a box and be overwhelmed by the world. While she acknowledged that she does not always paint positive emotions, it’s how she wants to come off and be there for the people around her. She makes sure to keep her paintings ambiguous so that anyone could read them in the way that speaks to them the most, whether it be a more melancholic or optimistic outlook.
Kaylie now continues to work on the body of work about depersonalization. She is hoping to work on larger pieces, and looking forward to getting her masters soon. She recently had a show in March at Dacia Gallery in the East Village and she has also participated in the Greenpoint Open Studios in May. Kaylie’s studio is always open for a visit, and she is welcoming anyone who would like to get to know her and see her paintings in real life. My personal advice: do it. What if you suddenly find yourself in one of the portraits?
Instagram: @kayliependleton
Website: kayliependletonart.com
