About the Artist

Kevin James - American - b. Bangor, Maine, 1951

    My artistic intent is to take what has come before in the arena of painting and sculpture, add my responses to what I have experienced in life and make art that goes beyond the former and visually reflects the latter.

    The underlying themes in my work are freedom and connection to the world in which I live. As a young man, before I came to the realization that I was an artist, I was neither free nor connected. I felt at odds with the world, which led to depression, anger and run-ins with authority. Those things made me a prisoner, either of my own pain or of the state. Once I came to art, I felt free and recognized a place for me in the world.

    I could have chosen to paint the mean streets or jails that had been my home for so long or try to illustrate the accompanying anger and frustration, but all that was clearly the “before” aspect of my life. The “after” is standing atop a high place, my feet on sun-warmed granite, commanding a view of river, lake or ocean below. It is gliding in the Da’s ould canoe along the shore of stream or lake whose surface acts as both window and mirror, revealing rocks below and reflecting trees and sky above.

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    My friend and Maine’s former poet laureate, Wes McNair says a poem is words and phrases wrapped around an insight. I liken my process in painting to poetry because I take my emotional response to a subject and wrap it in colour, composition and texture of my choosing.

  Besides painting, another artistic practice in which I am engaged is the making of objet trovés (found object) and found wood art. After I began painting, I did so every day religiously. Ten years or so later, I encountered, for the first time, some sort of block. I was at a loss for what to do about it, yet needed desperately to do something with my hands and mind. Along the railroad tracks which ran beside the urban hovel I called both home and studio at the time, I found a pile of old discarded lumber and built a nine-foot tall sculpture of myself. At the hip, I embedded a railroad spike and painted it red, a symbol of the arthritis which has been my constant companion since around the time I came of age. As I worked on that piece, I recalled how, as a young boy, whenever I was without adult supervision, I was given to raiding my Da’s garage and workshop and those of my friends’ fathers, and attaching pulleys, circular saw blades and other bits of metal to boards, wooden crates and furniture for the sole purpose of making things that “looked cool.” My present day practice in this medium involves more than achieving a cool look. I am still fond of pulleys and saw blades though. The objects and materials themselves inform the process in a number of ways. They determine whether a piece is fully three-dimensional or wall-hung and, more often than not, the concept of a work is suggested by the material.

    Objet trovés and found wood art provides me with a language as expressive and nuanced as any other. In this language, I can depict a scene, make visual puns or rage against the machine.

  June 2023