Easton, PA

Ken Kewley

http://www.kenkewley.com

Studio Painting IV (4) and Studio Painting VI (6) are invented portraits of the room where Kewley paints.  What excites Kewley in the world is brought into his studio.  The painting process starts with making color shapes.  A cardboard straight edge is used to form shapes.  This method creates a clean line and that big jump from one color to the next is what Kewley finds so exciting in the world.  Sometimes shapes remain shapes.  All the juxtapositions of objects in everyday life make up abstractions, as much as they do, things with names.  Sometimes shapes turn into patterns.  In Kewley’s neighborhood of Easton, Pennsylvania, people use trellis, a framework of light wooden or metal interwoven or intersecting bars, chiefly used as a support for fruit trees or climbing plants, around their houses and this crisscross pattern appears in Studio Painting IV (4) and Studio Painting VI (6).  Sometimes shapes turn into objects such as tables, plates of fruit, and other things.  In Kewley’s studio, he started constructing little houses, trees, figures – still life objects out of corrugated cardboard.  In doing so, Kewley can bring the visual world outside, in miniature, into his studio and then ultimately into his paintings.  From here, things are put in, taken out, arranged and rearranged, composed until it all feels right.

Studio Painting IV (4) and Studio Painting VI (6) are part of a six-series set.  These paintings are based after French artist Georges Braque’s series, with the same name, and are a coming together of the drawing, collage, and sculpture.  In the process of creating these painting, Kewley tried to keep things as adjustable as the small drawings by constantly repainting and adjusting (the quick drying acrylic paint allows this) in order to get closer to the feel and directness of quick drawings.  The objects, shapes, and patterns of the studio enter his work.  These paintings surprise Kewley as much as he hopes they do the same for the viewer.