NYAB Event - Tim Kennedy “Paynetown”

Tim Kennedy “Paynetown”

First Street Gallery

This event has ended.

Paynetown, a solo exhibition of paintings by Tim Kennedy, is held at First Street Gallery. This is Mr. Kennedy’s seventh solo exhibition at First Street Gallery. In this exhibition Mr. Kennedy looks to public spaces for inspiration in and around Bloomington, Indiana, a prototypical Midwestern college town, both invisible and universal in its quotidian resonance. These new paintings have as subjects a state park on an inland lake with a beach and a marina and also include larger figure compositions based on the leisure activities that occur in these settings. Since Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, representations of the pursuit of leisure have held a mirror to contemporary notions of identity, class and human interactions with nature. In the largest figurative painting of this group, leisure appears almost as a form of work as a couple carries a cooler near a car, seemingly to prepare for an outing. As in Watteau, it is unclear whether they are at the beginning or the end of their voyage.

Kennedy has continued his exploration of portraiture by focusing on neighbors and colleagues, often in pairs or family groups. Painted from life, these portraits emphasize the psychology of the sitters through the depiction of their interaction both with their surroundings and, more subtly, with one another. These are time-intensive works, demanding the artist’s continual presence as both interloper and collaborator. The most ambitious of these, the Ksander-Hicks Family Portrait, is a six-foot canvas of a husband and wife with their two children. We may not know the sitters personally, but they are people we recognize. Part of the pleasure afforded by the portraits is the discernment of physical resemblances between family members and hints of character and psychology as it is revealed through posture and body language.

Tim Kennedy’s paintings fall solidly into the tradition of painterly American realism that prizes the particular and the empirical. The paintings allow the viewer to examine a 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 landscape views, objects or interiors. The paintings celebrate life as it is experienced through the senses. Mr. Kennedy’s use of oil paint favors visceral color and the undisguised presence of the artist’s hand. It is work on a human scale that manifests a direct encounter with perceptual experience, and convey an atmosphere filled with light and air.