SHELDON FINE ART
Kenneth Evans
Creativity has been a constant passion throughout my life. As I have always lived on the coast, I have a strong emotional response not only to the beauty of our coastal seas and lands, but I have also developed a deeper understanding of how these sustain us and are necessary to our daily lives. As I paint I find these coastal areas particularly magnificent and inspirational.
Born by the shore in Stamford, CT, it was also this proximity to New York which afforded me the opportunity to study and paint in the City’s abundant art world, from abstract to landscape. From this I am primarily self-taught, yet I have had considerable study with Kirill Doron, a former University of Moscow professor of painting. He practiced and taught a form of realism which merged rather nicely with and served as a strong basis for the considerable further study I pursued with John Stobart, who taught the proper Royal Academy techniques of classical realism. Further study with several other of the best Landscape and Coastal artists of the day brought me to where I wished to be in a contemporary sense.
I now use later Luminist techniques in a studio set piece, in my own form of Contemporary Realism, which still seems to have more than a tinge of experimentation and color theory learned in my early Greenwich Village and NYC days.
However, I do feel there is something much more open in what I paint than the term Contemporary Realism implies. I prefer Metamodern
if any at all. To me this is an understanding beyond Postmodern as I had already experienced it in NYC in the 50s and 60s when it was fresh and shockingly new. I also feel that in some if not most of my pieces there is an element of the metaphysical – something beyond the physical motif I would seem to be painting. The pieces are produced in relation to something real, but then this is allowed to set off the imagination and at times a meditation like process, from which feelings and emotions develop which somehow end up on the canvas as strokes of paint.
My work has been written of and advertised in all the major art magazines from Fine Art Connoisseur to American Art Review, and my work has sold nationally and internationally. I have had one person shows or been featured most years since 1989 from Newport, RI to Carmel, CA. Recently I have been given one person exhibitions , at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum, Fall 2012, and the Captain Bangs Hallet House, Summer 2010. This same year I had a featured piece in the “Masters of the Sea” American Society of Marine Artists exhibit at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. One of my paintings is the current entryway piece for The Cape Cod Maritime Museum since 2011, and is also published as part of a book called Cape Water Craft from History Press. He is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Cape Cod Cultural Center. In 2015 he was in 2 of the most major Marine Art Exhibitions in the country along with the most significant artists of the genre.
I have taught painting at the Mystic, CT Art Center, and at the Orleans, MA Continuing Education Center, and I teach painting at the Cape Museum of Fine Art. I show at a number of other finest art galleries across the country.
