Karis Kizito-McParland (aka Upton) speaks about drawing as if it were a biological function, something she has always done, something she never had to learn to want. Painting came later, almost by accident, as a way of discovering what her lifelong lines would become when given color, density, and scale. But the core of her practice remains the same: shapes, angles, bodies arranged not for likeness but for the geometry they reveal.
She constructs figures entirely from imagination, placing them on the canvas like coordinates in tension, circles, diagonals, gestures that hover between support and collapse. Her influences range from Magritte’s surreal interior world to the fierce self-examination of Kahlo and Paula Rego, but what she is really chasing is the geometry inside human relation: how bodies lean toward or away from one another, how connection twists, lifts, binds, or strains.
Her current work, three gold figures on a square canvas, is an experiment in ambiguity. Are they holding each other up or pulling each other down? Is the gesture a rescue, a struggle, or both? Upton prefers that the viewer hover in that uncertainty. She paints quickly, intensely, in sessions measured by hours rather than weeks, trusting that immediacy preserves the authenticity of the impulse before interpretation hardens into explanation.
This human geometry is her way of making coherence visible: the hidden architecture of how people relate, the angles we form around one another, and the shapes we occupy when honesty becomes palpable, even when nothing is spoken.
