Meet Ken!

Today, we begin the first installment of our latest series. Today's all about Ken—and there was so much good content that we had to do a separate post! As we promised, you'll get to know each of us a little better, one by one. Each week, we'll take a few minutes to learn what inspires us, why we paint what we do, our history....or just some fun facts.

Today, we feature Ken as our first artist. This seemed right, as he's our longest-running artist, having painted for about 20 years. He's an award-winning artist with several solo shows under his belt. Faithful blog readers recognize his distinctive, colorful style. Perhaps you're wondering how he developed that style.

Well, that's exactly what he discussed in today's short talk—and what we're going to share with you now. Ken brought props, too—a small selection of paintings from about 2005 to date. So, while we're not looking at the full history of Ken, it was a great retrospective.

We begin with one of Ken's favorite subjects....his cat(s). During a time in his life where he was very busy, he selected a photo of something he knew well (his cat) and did a series of about 12 paintings exploring Annie in technicolor.

 
Then Ken developed an interest in portraits, but felt he didn't know how to paint faces. To teach himself, he did a series of paintings based on photos by Julia Cameron.

Having mastered portraits, Ken got the gardening bug. Despite prior protestations that he had no interest in painting flowers, he was enamored of his morning glories and tomato plants and—you guessed it—another series ensued.

Winter came....the morning glories died...and Ken revisited his cat paintings. Only this time, he went more abstract, zooming in on the cat's eyes.

Shortly after that series, Ken combined his interest in printmaking with his paintings. Moving closer to abstraction, he overlaid a grid of linoleum stamps over cats...

...and then, over women.

In a logical next step, Ken kept the stamps and returned to his tomato plants. This time though, he emphasized the grids and patterning and integrated the two elements...

...followed by a "crazy cats" series which featured rich, densely patterned cats.

Ever fascinated by abstraction, Ken's next step was to eliminate any realistic subject and concentrate on the paint itself...the composition and colors, how they filled the page, how they blended and moved and flowed...

...culminating in a painting where Ken kept working and working, documenting each step. This painting took 7 whole weeks to paint (and became notorious as a weekly subject of conversation). Notice the complementary colors? This has always been a hallmark of Ken's approach to color.

Having taken this series as far as he could (or cared to), Ken returned to a subject dear to his heart....his cats. This time, he had new models, Buddy and Sweetie, and he painted them in an abstract style that emphasized their relationship. At the same time, he rekindled his love of pattern, particularly stripes, as you can see in the background.

In fact, he was so interested in stripes, he returned to totally abstract paintings featuring just stripes. And it was around this time that Ken began to explore earth colors like ochres, siennas, umbers, and off greens like hookers and sap green. He liked the slightly muted, "dirty" colors he got...different from his previous rainbow palette.

Ken decided the stripes needed more structure, so he confined them to shapes from an old series of trolleys (abstracted, of course)....

 ...and then to shapes on a grid (with the stripes themselves creating the grid, in some cases)....

 All this culminated in a series inspired by Rothko. It started out very structured....

...and progressed to a much looser exploration of color blocks, like his famous wavy bacon painting.

Notice that Ken's still not over his fascination with stripes. They've become finer and subtler in this series where he revisits one of his favorite models.

And even when he tries something completely different....landscapes....Ken can't escape the stripes.

His next series is about urban, rather than rural, landscapes, featuring views from his window. (But he still sees his world with stripes.)

All of which brings us to his current urban landscapes, part of the same series, but incorporating patterns beyond stripes.

So what have we learned about Ken? Some things that are evident when looking at his entire body of work are:

• Ken has several subjects he loves (cats, trains, women, trolleys and stripes). He returns to them again and again, approaching them from a different viewpoint each time. As a result, they are always fresh and different.
• He limits his variables in other ways besides subject matter. Notice that he regularly paints on the same size and type of paper and he has a palette of colors unique to him. Only when he knew them well did he branch out to test new colors—one at a time, but in families.
• Notice, too, that Ken paints in series. He gets an idea and develops it in a series of about 8-12 paintings....and then he moves on. As things change in his life or he gets new inspirations, he incorporates that into his paintings. Change, but with a common thread.

Whew! Wasn't that an interesting journey? All these paintings are uniquely Ken, but you can see how he's progressed over time. Makes us eager to see what's next. And it builds anticipation for the artists to follow (although Ken certainly has set a high bar for the rest of us!).

Keep watching this space to meet us all.