Renting Space in Painting

Growing up as a mostly poor kid has some advantages.  With eight kids, my family could not keep up with the latest fashion trends, going for the Sears store brand shoes instead of the Nike's.  We were always two or three video game systems behind the current higher resolution system. My parents drove cars that were old, not so old they were cool but more like "what kind of car is that?" kind of old.  Okay, so we were that peculiar kind of American poor where we still had clothes, video games, and cars.  But still, we were continually forced to consider how we could fix up what was broken (like the time my dad used a metal baking pan to replace the housing around our damaged AMC Gremlin's headlight- genius!), fake our way into being stylish (like sharing the few cool outfits that  my older brother and I had between us when we started attending separate schools, so nobody would notice), and in general to just make do with what we had.  I remember countless times getting home from school to find that our living room had been completely reconfigured.  This was always my mom's doing.  Something about living with nine other people always lead her to daydream about a larger, smarter, and more custom built house, one with coordinating, contemporary furnishings.  What we had were cramped "eclectic" rooms furnished with the odd pieces that had been salvaged from the neighbors curb or hauled from a garage sale.  My mom did battle with this state of function over form by constantly reconfiguring the layout of a room, believing that a smart, diagonal interaction between the 1960's hardwood futon couch with recovered blue denim cushions and the 1970's grass green prototype Lazyboy recliner would distract from the large wooden TV (with good speakers) that served as the TV stand.  Or maybe the hunter green Naugahyde-upholstered wooden chest could serve multiple functions in front of the fireplace: accentuate the rust-red carpet, store extra blankets, make another sitting surface, and block sight of the non-usable fireplace.  At the time, we just humored my mom every time she solemnly moved the brass floor lamp to the other side of the living room, but I have grown to appreciate this environment where elements stay in flux and where faith in the saving grace of good design  thrives, despite the tragic circumstances in which it must operate. 

Fast forward from the early nineties to 2007.  I was trying to finish my MFA in painting, even though I had only managed to create a very large mountain of crap in two years of grad school, and I couldn't seem to pull my thoughts together into a coherent and unified artist statement.  Up to this point, I had managed to teach art in a low-income high school for 6 years, but I had taken far more education classes as an undergrad than actual art classes.  I mean, at one point in grad school I had to teach myself how to stretch a canvas, because I had been wrapped up in the history and philosophy of education instead of  foundations in acrylics and oils in my first go round of college.  I was feeling pretty defeated, feeling like an outsider to the world of painting, feeling like I couldn't keep up or fit in with my peers. But then I realized that this was very familiar territory.  It was then that I stopped talking about making paintings in my artist statement, and started using the phrase "using the space of painting."  I knew that I was never going to be a technical aficionado with paint, and that I was never going to discover the next "ism" or movement.  Instead I was going to be a renter in the space of painting, and move in with all of my second-hand, uncoordinated furnishings.  I would fake style. I would survive by being open to new configurations, and not committing to a fixed plan.

This has played out pretty well.  And, as the last few years have taught us about finding a home, ownership is not always superior to renting space.

Please visit my work at kevinpkellyart.artspan.com