Dani Kump (b. 1979, California) creates paintings that unfold in layers—across time, memory, and shifting states of awareness. Each work begins with an intuitive underpainting, created in a flow state where instinct guides mark-making. These initial gestural paintings are then put away, for months or years, allowing distance, time, and perspective to reshape them.

When the work is returned to, new information reveals itself—forms, patterns, or context that weren’t accessible at first. A second layer is then composed, often structured in a grid or repeat pattern that brings new clarity and resolution to the original surface. The process mirrors the logic of weaving: threads pulled through at different intervals and depths, creating patterns emerging through the repetition and restraint across a loom.

Kump’s practice is an act of translation and her paintings are visual records of moments metabolized, reinterpreted, and brought into harmony through time. She pursued an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies at Boston University and has been painting since 2005. 

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Place-maker.  I think that’s probably the most efficient way to define myself to you at this stage of my life.  I am an artist, yes, but I also want to share with you the source material for where my art comes from and why it matters so much to me.

After the past year of centering my energy back into a full-time studio practice I’ve been exploring a wide variety of scale and media to get my sea legs again.  Now that I have a body of work to examine, I am starting to understand what I’ve been up to over here.  

I’ve discovered that the primary interest of my life, in every form it has taken — daughter, sibling, wife, mother, business owner, cook, graphic designer, home-maker, artist, friend — has been to foster an environment for others to feel inspired.  That’s what I care about.  That’s it.  I know my purpose — my vocation —  is to urge you towards more beauty, however you perceive it.

Right now, that energy is being channeled primarily though paint.  But I am also starting to explore curation. I love bringing people together in unexpected venues to experience spontaneous acts of art and beauty and I hope you’ll see more of this in the coming years. As much as I want to simplify my message to you, to just cleanly locate myself in an art world, my influences come from a variety of source material.  I know this isn’t special. 

All creative brains — at least the ones I’m interested in — have been influenced by a vast range of experiences, places, concepts, thinkers.  I am looking at artists as much as I am looking at nature, interiors, architecture, chefs, music. 

I hope you will find my heroes, and perhaps even some of your own, in my work.