A Thousand Collages and the Landscape-Without the Outdoors with Ken Kewley

We will draw and paint by means of collage. The statements, ‘You cannot make it up’ and ‘You must make it up’ are both true. We must let both guide us. What we put down on our paper are real things that we can adjust just as we move through the landscape looking for something to paint. It is this abstraction that we must adjust if we are working purely abstractly or if we are working from life. We will make hundreds of abstract collages. Then we will travel back to kindergarten when we did not need to set up our easels in front of our houses in order to draw our world. Next we will move into the third dimension and make a world from corrugated cardboard. This will become our model. We will work from it and – with our rediscovered freedom, without it. All along we will share a path away from copying and rendering toward a more exciting – and ultimately – a more real picture of what we find beautiful in the world.

Ken Kewley graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a night watchman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1980-1990 and considers this a major part of his education.  In New York his work has been exhibited at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Lori Bookstein Fine Art and Pavel Zoubok. He teaches workshops and lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Hollins University, University of Arkansas, National Academy of Design, and the Jerusalem Studio School, including the Italian Summer Program. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Sun, ARTnews, and the New York Observer and included in many private and public collections.