Alumnae Artists - Constance Kilgore ’69

Ms. Constance Kilgore ’69 never wanted a career that would pigeonhole her. “I have an impulse to just try everything,” she says. “A lot of my art is about process and not product.” She considered a career in the arts “an oxymoron.”

Constance describes herself as eclectic and diverse in style, interests, and subject matter, and was drawn to art from a young age. “I always drew as a kid. I think it was my means of escape,” she says. 

After graduating from the University of Colorado, Ms. Kilgore painted on Long Island before moving to England, where she took a course about teaching English as a second language and trained as a Montessori teacher. She spent time in Sicily tutoring English before settling in London, where she found work as a picture framer preparing commissions for the Royal Academy of Arts and creating her own abstract paintings.

“There was something about the atmosphere in England that resonated with me,” she says. “There were a lot of artists I really admired, and I was deeply inspired by the painters of 1970s London.” 

Her art gained recognition after she was accepted to the prestigious John Moores Liverpool Exhibition (now known as the John Moores Painting Prize), a juried biennial that draws submissions from artists across the United Kingdom, and her painting was exhibited alongside prior prize winners, including David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin. She was accepted for a second exhibit two years later, and both times her paintings sold. “That kind of freaked me out,” she admits.

After five years in London, Ms. Kilgore moved back to New York City, but had a difficult time feeling inspired. “I just thought, what am I doing? I had an artistic identity crisis,” she says. With time, she came to see those moments of uncertainty as a natural part of artistic life. “Everybody goes through these bouts of second-guessing themselves.”

While Ms. Kilgore continued to paint, including preparing new pieces for a show at the Sheffield City Art Gallery, she began teaching at Park Avenue Christian Church Day School (now Park Children’s Day School). It was there that she began drawing portraits of children, initially providing one for a charity auction, which led to a constant stream of more than 100 commissioned portraits.

Another shift came when, years later, a friend invited her to a summer residency in Estonia. The Baltic landscape and near-constant sunlight launched a series of cloud paintings that blended abstract expression with realism. “I remember seeing these billowing clouds and this incredible light bouncing through them,” she says. 

More recently, Ms. Kilgore has been experimenting across mediums, working with oil and cold wax, meditative drawings inspired by her yoga practice, and collage. She’s particularly drawn to collage at the moment. “I find that really fun because I’m not expecting anything of it. It’s just for me.”

In addition to her art, Ms. Kilgore has explored the relationship between art and healing. After completing an advanced yoga training, she exhibited a series of 108 meditative drawings inspired by the beads of a mala. The show was titled Mala: 108 Meditations on One. Several of her cloud paintings hang in treatment areas at Yale New Haven Health Smilow Cancer Hospital, and she has produced commissioned work for a hospital in Maine, as well as a retirement community in South Carolina. 

“I like that my work is going into these places where it’s having an impact on people,” she says. “Knowing that my work has an emotional impact is really moving for me.”

Ms. Kilgore traces some of her earliest creative curiosities to her time at Brearley. “I got a lot out of being at Brearley,” she reflects. “Shop was great, and it got me interested in making all kinds of things. I loved anything where you could use your hands, the more tactile kind of work, and I loved the library.”

She remembers loving her Class V teacher, Mrs. Katharine Stryker Dunn Bingham ’28, and Class VI teacher, Mrs. Frances Taliaferro, who “brought all kinds of whimsy to class.” Years later, she reconnected with Mrs. Taliaferro at a class gathering and stayed in touch. “Mrs. Taliaferro and her husband bought a couple of my paintings, which was really such a nice full-circle moment. It kind of floored me,” she says.

Today, Ms. Kilgore embraces experimentation and uncertainty. When faced with a creative block or self-doubt, she coaxes herself to work in different ways. “I like to shake things up: sometimes I use my left hand or draw with my feet or do blind drawing, something really wacky,” she says.

“You have to be curious,” she says. “I like going through the ugly stage—it can lead you to surprising places.”