Event detail
Born in 1968, Kevin has been drawing and painting since his was old enough to pick up a pencil.
His enduring fascination with paint, coupled with his abiding desire to learn as much about its medium has been the driving force in Kevin’s artistic practice.
For five years he ran his own art gallery in the USA, catering to an eclectic mix of collectors and artist. Latterly to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for knowledge he enrolled as a mature student studying fine art at the University of Creative Arts, testing whether the formal structure of pastoral landscape painting can be a modern genre with contemporary critique.
Kevin believes landscape can be read like a text, it is the scene of life, pragmatic, poetic, rhetorical and polemic – a carrier of meaning.
“For I alone bring into being for myself the tradition I elect to carry on – the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished since that distance is not one of its prophecies if I alone were not there to scan it with my gaze,” - Merleau-Ponty
Kevin gets his inspiration from running cross country through the Surrey Hills and using the perspective gained from a canal boat on the River Wey, that in some ways are reminiscent of Turner; an artist much admired by Kevin as the last of the great landscape artists.
Kevin's work has now started to be recognised, finding it's way into many collections including that of Loyd Grossman, a keen art lover.
Kevin writes about his inspiration for this show....
my paintings are local landscapes, they don't have to be local, landscapes begin when it absorbs all presences into itself; it's a medium I use to express myself and I use what is around me, the Surrey landscape.
Six months ago I moved into a studio in the Surrey Hills, surrounded by woodlands, streams and pastures, where I spend my free time either running cross country or going on adventures with my youngest daughter. The countryside is beautiful and constantly changing.
I moved here at the beginning of Autumn, the beginning of my inspiration. Tones become muted, no longer the harsh division between land and sky of the Summer, now a subtle transition; one absorbing the other. We begin to look more at the horizon and in the process of looking and finding, we are reassessing our position in the world: or is it that we become more aware of our status of embedment.
My paintings are that, a dichotomy: little presence of us, but without us there is nothing to paint. But if we stand still the horizon is always a determined distance from where we stand, we move and it is gone. It is a reality we all have, a consciosness distancing itself. Thats why I paint.
The remarkable but most obvious thing about paintings is that they are not real. Landscape painters can be quick to forget that, they focus on the illustrative representation; local landscape we are always inherently there, we know it, but the sublime is in the subtleties, a hedgerow, a road, a woodland fire.
In my practice, I see, I think, I paint. It's my mood, my frame of mind.
http://www.mcallisterthomasfinart.co.uk/exhibition-54-title.html
