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Visitors to “Ken Kewley Collage & Painting,” the latest exhibition at the Grossman Gallery, will find themselves transported to a world awash in color through the Easton artist’s use of the juxtaposition of color and light.
The exhibit, located in the Williams Visual Arts Building, will run through Feb. 24. Grossman Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Kewley will also host a public lecture at 4:15 p.m. Feb. 1 in room 108 in the Williams Center for the Arts, a public reception from 5:30-7 p.m. Feb. 1 in the Grossman Gallery, and a number of private educational workshops for high school students in Toia’s community program and Lafayette students.
Kewley works predominately in collage and oil painting and both of these techniques feed off each other. His pieces appear as well-defined patchworks of color with no layering or blending.
“Collage was a natural progression for Ken. His paintings are constructed in a manner similar to collage, placing one hue against another,” says Jim Toia, director of the gallery and the College’s Community Based Teaching Program. “His work is driven by how colors react to one another and how those optic dynamics reflect back into our eyes.”
Kewley received a degree in painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976 and then spent a number of years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in order to be close to great art. He later moved to Easton in search of studio space. Many of his paintings and collages use Easton and the surrounding area as inspiration such as “From South Fifth Street, Easton, Pa.”
The exhibit contains more than 60 pieces created from 1981-2006. A number of his collages are interpretations of works by famous artists. He examines the colors of a painting by Picasso, Renoir, or Braque and depicts what he sees through the placement of shaped bits of paper. This intricate process brings out a field of colors working together to produce a combined effect.
A review of Kewley’s work in the December 2005 edition of ARTnews says, “Ken Kewley’s precise paper collages reconstructed familiar motifs – clothed figures, nudes, towns and cityscapes, as well as variations on famous paintings – and made them look new. Regardless of its subject matter, each of them compressed the larger world into a beguiling little picture cut and faceted like a jewel.”
Many of Kewley’s oil paintings have an equal amount of focus on the juxtaposition of color and appear collage-like because of the use of blocks of color with no blending. Other works in the show are abstract and observational paintings, and landscapes and still lifes in both collage and oil painting. The exhibit is organized by both type of technique and theme of content.
Toia stresses that Kewley’s exhibit is a perfect example of the goal of the Williams Visual Arts Building to be an educational tool for the community. Kewley took advantage of many of the program’s public Thursday Night Open Studio drawing sessions.
“It is rewarding to see that work come back to us,” he says. “[The programs] are a way for the College to give back to the community and share local talent with the world.”
Toia also believes Kewley’s approach to art, with its focus on color and form, lends itself well to teaching and the multidisciplinary nature of the arts. This is why Kewley will be holding workshops with art students in various courses as well as a course focusing on vision taught by Elaine Reynolds, associate professor of biology and co-chair of neuroscience.
“It is natural to bring in beginning students to talk about composition and organizational relationships,” he says. “The sessions will be exceptionally valuable because Ken’s focus on structure can translate into any of the visual arts.”
Kewley has held solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and La Jolla, Calif., and has been part of dozens of group exhibitions all over the country. His most recent show was at Connexions Gallery in Easton, from Sept. 23- Nov. 12, 2006.