Danielle Mckinney Never Thought Her Paintings Would Be Seen Like This

THE SUBJECTS OF Danielle Mckinney’s paintings are exclusively Black women, like the artist herself. They are generally posed inside darkly lit but nevertheless inviting domestic spaces. The effect is both casual and courtly: Her women lounge on couches and read magazines. They smoke gracefully but with what Mckinney, 42, described as “a worldly tension.” In person, she shares a kind of understated glamour with her subjects, and she paints the act of smoking with nostalgia and envy. She started smoking when she was 13; when I first visited her Jersey City, N.J., studio last April, she was trying not to fall off the wagon. “After the last one, it’s been 70 days,” she said. “But I had two in between there.”

Her paintings are small and, as more and more people have seen them — something that’s been known to make other painters’ work expand in tandem with their egos — they’ve only gotten smaller, often not much larger than a sheet of notebook paper. She uses a richly textured oil, a more stubborn material than acrylic, which dries faster and is easier to control. And whereas most painters favor white gesso to prepare a canvas, Mckinney chooses an almost counterintuitive layer of black. Her figures seem to emerge out of shadows, like a photograph being developed.

The women she paints are imagined — unlike many portrait painters, she doesn’t have models sit for her — but she refers to her paintings as “my babies,” and talks of her subjects as if they were trusted friends. “They smoke for me,” she said. When one of her paintings — “We Need to Talk,” a 2020 portrait of a woman in a white dress collapsed on a bed with her black cat looking on — went up for auction at Christie’s in New York last May, Mckinney was stressed out by having to watch something she made become such a commodity. She cried, then smoked an entire pack of Marlboro Reds. She came to terms with the sale a week later, when the couple who purchased the work attended the opening of her second solo show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. “We’re so happy to have her,” they reassured her. “Come visit her anytime you want.”

Being in this kind of demand is untested territory for Mckinney. When 2020 began, she was living in New Jersey, just on the other side of the Holland Tunnel from New York City, with her husband, Robert Roest, who’s Dutch and also a painter, and working full time as a manager of course planning in the architecture program at the Parsons School of Design in Lower Manhattan. Seven years earlier, Mckinney had completed an M.F.A. in photography at Parsons, a degree for which she was still paying off loans. Her mother gave Mckinney her first camera when she was 15. Her art, she’d say, was about “watching people look.” She shot one series during her morning commute, asking fellow subway riders if she could touch them, and photographing their reactions.