Cherry Cheesecake with Pear, 2000, oil on panel, 8 x 10 in.
Passion, excitement needs to be there at the beginning to have it there at the end.
If you have a circle in your mind you will not make a square. If you try to draw the perfect circle you fail and the result is your own circle.
Many things are invented when one tries to repeat the past and fails or through misunderstanding.
Some of the best t-shirt slogans come from misreading.
Good things come when one no longer cares about pleasing anyone else.
We do the paintings we want to see.
The same lessons need to be learnt over and over.
Paint itself is beautiful. It amazes me how someone can make something so ugly with it.
Mastering paint is the ability to move from the large things to the small things and back again, always within the whole.
Canel Keeper’s House. 2009 oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.
Composing has to do with setting up rhymes and rhythms between forms. “Visual art is the intuitively ordered play of forms and sometimes colors within a contain arena”. – J. Goodrich. Keep things in flux. You must be willing to get rid of anything. Painting is visual poetry. Take a page of descriptive writing, remove enough words and you have a poem. As has been said about sculpture; remove everything from the block of marble that is not the subject.
The artist must show the viewer exactly what they want the viewer to see, in what order and at what speed. Show me more forcefully what I should be looking at. Forms must be described by drawing enclosing lines at the same time. Do not spend a lot of time on one side of a form. You got to enclose that form quickly. It is hard to describe something with one hand.
Houses with Horse and Dog. (in progress) acrylic on wood panel, 18 x 36 in.
The live model is capable of infinite number of abstract forms that do not read quickly as human.
Setting up a still life is like sculpting.
Sometimes there is no painting there. It is not the subject but the abstraction that must carry the painting.
Colors and forms are forces. Painting is using these forces. Illustration is relying on descriptive details.
Love of color makes a colorist.
Painting can surpass nature by the nature of composing into a visual poetry. Think music; sounds composed into otherworldly passages.
I love messy precision, very loose and very specific at the same time, wildly using a straight edge, the straight line drawn by hand and the messy mark drawn with the use of a straight edge.
Nude (after Derain), 2007 7 1/2 x 5 1x 8 inches Collage
Get back to the joy of painting and trust that all you need to know is within you.
My daughter’s elementary school art room has a wall of windows. From the projects they do in this room there is nothing that shows that they ever look out the window. The art teacher according to what I hear from my daughter has never said “look out the window and draw”. What they do are projects. Project implies an already known result. It is something like a safety net. It removes some of the excitement or the chance of what the teacher might think is failure, but this is not a trapeze. The freedom to look and draw does not put the child in danger. Looking and drawing does not kill creativity, teachers do. It begins with the first word spoken in reaction to the child’s work. What if the parent responded by drawing? Painting is a language that is easier learnt when young. Artists dealing with ideas (conceptual artists) who use paint to illustrate ideas (jokes) are illustrators more than painters. Using paint does not make one a painter. Paint can do so much more. The life of a painter is a life of exploring
Painting Perceptions was started in 2009 by Larry Groff to promote the ideas, practice and experience of painters working from observation in a modernist vein from around the world through interviews, essays, videos and community. It later evolved to include imagination-based and abstract painting as well.
This is breathtaking. I definitely want to read more from Ken if that’s possible. I’ve heard a lot about Ken, have been following his work and hope to take a class with him at some point. I would love to take a color class with him! When I saw your Certosa photo of him putting pottery shards together in a color class it was most intriguing and I wanted to know more. Thanks for posting this, I’ve read it a couple times and will keep it close by…this is the way I want to hear about color. You are so right most writings, teachings on color are pretty dreadful, they certainly lack the passion Ken clearly has for it. Lots of great statements in here but for me the best line ever…”Love colors as writers love words. It is the love that comes through when the mind gets out of the way. Don’t think too much.”
Thanks Ann and Austin for such thoughtful comments. It isn’t easy to respond to the many ideas that Ken presents here but you both went to the heart of the matter.
Despite how much I like what he says, I’m not sure I could always follow his advice. Perhaps because I lean more towards the kind of writer who pulls his hair out and curses and bangs his hands on the keyboard that some particular grouping of words sounds so idiotic!
Many times I feel that way with color and painting, that it is less play than a agonizing struggle to capture the fleeting moment, trying to “get” something seemingly impossible. Yet, other painters, like Corot, get it dead on. But it is wonderful paradox that the more you try to copy nature the less real and “off” it tends to look but once you get the bigger, more abstract structure of light and form right and gives the painting feeling of rightness – from what the painting needs. It is in this moment, when you loose yourself in this process that the color can really transcend the arbitrary (like you see in colored drawing or more decorative approaches) and start to take on real meaning in the painting in terms of how the color relates to the whole.
For me, this starts to feel like loving colors and not thinking too much. I wish I could get there more often.
Thanks for this. Rather Zarathustra on color. You can always tell a good teacher by the absence of pedantry. As for me, getting grey was a turning point in my color journey, i.e. mixing black w/ a transparent yellow. The possibility of all those gentle modulations was an epiphany … or love at first sight. That seems to be the secret: you have to fall in love first. It was a struggle for me as an autodidact, to find my color, to fall in love. But that begs a question. How do non-painters ever get it? Especially in this age of diminishing connoisseur-ship, when, as Mr. Kewley points out, standard art-education is joke. I guess the patron’s reasons don’t matter so long as they’re patrons.
On another note, I’ve heard it said, and observed it in nature, that an particular animal species’ intelligence can be judged by the amount of time its young spend in play. Ex post facto maybe. But I like to believe they’re intelligent because they play.
Thanks for great paintings and an interesting article!
What a great attitude Ken Kewley has towards the making of a painting… There is so much in this interview that could be discussed. I have been reading choice parts of this interview just to kick start my day of painting.
Thank you Larry for the Interview and a big thanks to Ken Kewley for his heart felt words.
What a generous article. Thanks to Ken and Larry.
I really was interested to read what he said about painting the model-
“When painting the model, treat each part (do not name the parts) as something separate and then compose the parts into a whole. Into a composition. Use as few shapes as possible, do not think human.”
I’ve always marveled at how Ken finds surprising shapes and marks and angles in his figures, and this gave me a clue as to how that happens. Composing separate pieces as opposed to constructing a human figure.
Hi Larry and Mr Kewly
Wish I had been able post this sooner – Great article. These are great thoughts – perhaps too many all at once. It’s like trying to read Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit in one sitting. That’s in part what took me so long – trying to give the ideas the time they need. Mr. Kewly has said so many useful things in this grouping. Some of which as artists we may know but we would be wise to revisit and others which are really profound and new. I love the idea that we need less in the paintings and that so many paintings are ruined by having said too much. I am disappointed that when I’m in Philadelphia for Stuart Shils workshop, Mr. Kewly’s talk won’t coincide with that. I’ll have to keep an eye out for any talks that he gives in NYC.
What a wonderful article – thank you. Being from Australia, I have not heard of Ken Kewly. How sad is that? Now I have discovered his wonderful abstracts, so will my students. He speaks to my heart and has managed to put into these few pages – and so succinctly- much of what I have been trying to teach my students all year (and yes, I am amazed at how beautiful paint can end up so ugly!) Being predominantly a landscape painter, his words”Do not make a picture of a landscape, create a landscape.” were particularly resonant, and “to relate everything in a complex journey without resulting in chaos takes a lifetime to master” is what keeps us all, I imagine, going. Nothing challenges, engages and rewards so much as painting.
And I will take note: “If you try too hard it will show up in the work as an unpleasant element. I do not like to see artist suffering”. Neither do I, nor do I like to experience of suffering myself, but it happens…after this, I will remember the joy more!
Ken.
Thank you so much for your words of comfort and clarity. Just pulled myself out of a hole and am grateful to be painting without that pit in my stomach. That hard time was a great learning time because I made mud. Then I realized it was actually pulling out of a process that wasn’t true for me and I’ve moved forward…clearer and more truthful. Love what you said about not making a picture of something but making something. Thank you for the wisdom.
all best.
Cynthia Wick
“Rinsing the brush can be avoided by transforming whatever is on the brush toward a nameable color by adding that color or the color that when mix becomes that color or away from that color by mixing that color’s opposite.”
Um, why am I the only one confused???
“Group both lights and darks to make a light complex and both darks and lights to make a dark complex within the composition.” “Composition = a composite.”
Can someone loan him a dictionary???
“Do not make a picture of a landscape, create a landscape. Every color needs to correspond to another, to others, and to the whole. The same sounds, the same paint, can be pleasurable in the right context.”
Genius use of cliches…
“Most things can not be separated. This includes color, form and composition.”
Oh god… Please stop writing Mr. Cruelly
As a painter who is primarily concerned with colour, I found this article very interesting and very helpful. It is also beautiful to read, as Ken writes so eloquently about his art and painting in general.
love this article! a lot of great observations. would love to share this with students.
what an amazing and inspiring read! thanks for sharing! this whole thing is quotable.
i wish i could tell you how helpful those observations are. i’ve never heard anyone get to the heart of what i’ve wondered about for so long. my sincerest appreciation for everyone’s effort with this as the information in it will be indispensable to me and my practice.
I’m very happy this was so helpful to you.
Ken Kewley’s article on color (I am new to this blog) interested me greatly. Do you realize that artists are not often asked specifically about color: how they see it, use it, create it etc. in interviews. …..Kewley’s remarks are most helpful to me in that sense. And……. what about the great, great Braque Atelier paintings, beginning in the late l920s and up through the 1950s…sheer poetry. I feel that Braque has been forgotten, but I look all the time at the studio paintings from those years and am enthralled with their beauty. John Gage’s Color and Culture chapter on painters and
their palettes is a frequent reference for me, as is Nicholas Watkins book on Bonnard’s palette and
his use of color.
Just reading my almost daily page or so of this beautiful essay, I believe it will become a classic – for working artists – in its way, like gombrich on art history or Barry Nemett on art appreciation.
First, great site newly brought to my attention. Bookmarked.
Kewley’s work with color reminds me of process and method in Howard Stern’s book “How to see color and paint it.” It is the best book about painting. Essentially it uses spectrum color theory wherein you mix clean color complement colors, find the neutral grey between them and all the variations from the warm to the cool side. For instance blue violet on the color wheel is pigment ultramarine, some alizarin and touch of white. Opposite on the wheel is yellow orange with pigment cad orange and cad yellow pale. Take 70% of each and mix together for your grey. From the grey you can add white and make incredible variations.
This Blog is engaging, thoughtful, practical,…like finding a friend. I use it to encourage students, add greater depth of information where I lack it, and see powerful work. Ken Kewley’s notes are equally enlightening and empathetic.
He is very intriguing. It seems to have a very extensively complex yet emotional understanding of color and how certain colors can spark specific feelings in the art viewer. I would actually love to see more of his work.
Very inspiring post! Thank you.