NYAB Event - Tim Kennedy "Appearances"

Tim Kennedy "Appearances"

First Street Gallery

This event has ended.

Appearances, a solo exhibition of paintings by Tim Kennedy, is held. This is Mr. Kennedy’s sixth solo exhibition at First Street Gallery. Once again, Mr. Kennedy looks to his neighborhood of 1920s bungalows in the Perry Four section of Bloomington, Indiana for inspiration. In this exhibition his focus is on the people of the area through portraits of neighbors and colleagues as well as paintings in the genres of interior, still life, townscape and figure composition. The exhibit will consist of both large-scale paintings and smaller works. The theme of the intimacy discovered and inherent within domestic life asserts itself across painting genre.

The portraits frequently hold more than one figure and all are done directly from life. The paintings emphasize the psychology of the sitters and their interaction both with their surroundings and, more subtly, with one another. Several of the sitters are related as couples or in a direct familial way – mothers and daughters or fathers and sons. We may not know them personally, but they are people we recognize. Part of the pleasure afforded by the paintings is being able to discern physical resemblances between people or to see hints of character and psychology revealed through posture and body language. The seemingly ordinary act of posing for a painting allows for this remarkable revelation of persona and relationship.

Tim Kennedy’s paintings fall solidly into the tradition of painterly American realism that prizes the particular and the empirical. They allow the viewer to examine the sharply experienced, yet ordinary event. The unspoken character at the center of the paintings is the connection of human relationships whether people are the primary subject or whether the subject consists of objects, interiors or landscape views. The paintings celebrate life experienced through the senses. Mr. Kennedy’s use of oil paint favors visceral color and the undisguised presence of the artist’s hand. This is work on a human scale that communicates direct experience with the subject and is filled with light and air.