i took a workshop over the weekend with Ken Kewley, who has a website I’m pretty sure, if you want to look him up. He’s been doing these workshops for a while each semester at PAFA. I felt like after it, I had an insight as to pafa’s Secret weapon. What’s funny is he didn’t refer to painting concepts that much (like Stewart preceding), and mentioned the phenomenon that for what’s said, the opposite is true, but through the two 9-5 days, we collaged panited papers and ran color copies then collaged into those, then greyscale copies, then collaged into those, so by the end we had about a hundred little compositions apiece.
Now I feel like I can see kanevsky, and... who else.. Thomas. And mostly those two.
Thomas. I’ve alluded to before. Thomas is a workhorse, he’s the PAFA pace-horse. That’s all I’ll say.
I hung all of my collages outside the studio, and showed Ken on his way out the building, much to his delight. His artist friends are Stewart Shils, Isreal Hirschberg, Ben Huberman, and Nancy Gruskin. He doesn’t think he knows David Hornung, but the name rings a bell. Michael Gallagher doesn’t know David Hornung either. Michael Gallagher curateda show with Ken’s work a few years back.
Ken did say something about student work when Rachel and I kind of cornered him outside our studio on his way out the building. Life is fine, and there’s such beauty, and you recognize it because it’s already inside of you - that sense of beauty- you know what to look for in a way— there’s a couple things that happen when you go out in search of a beautiful landscape- you have this Corot in your head, and you set out to look for a Corot, and you spend a lot of time. Well, the Corot’s aren’t out there. They’re made up. Well, they are and they aren’t. And you find the spot, and set up, and you look behind you and it’s way better.
The student sees it and puts it in, but it ruins the painting. The student doesn’t get that a painting is being made. The painting is different from the reality, and reality is subjective anyway, so the painting is the reality.
My paintings were much improved today. That he and Stewart are buds is funny; as Ken showed tons of Braque whose solutions were often to bring in a pair of colors to bracket in the painting, whereas Stewart (though he hardly mentioned painting terms directly) consistently pointed out the differences in colors that a plebeian might make on mix for (or maybe Braque)- the differences between the shadow colors of one window sill compared to those of another comes to mind. I’ll never forget staring into such obscure spots in the landscape with Stuart and witnessing the ‘same’ become radically different. . Stewart didn’t say this but hyper generalization in some things, hyper specificity in others. Ken is balance balance resolve. Ken also has fun with the painting in progress, and makes frame animations of the sequences.
