KEVIN FORD, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN A MEMORY AND A GLARE

Kevin Ford is a New York based artist born in Connecticut. He spent his youth taking the train into New York City to visit galleries and museums to feed his interest in art. After attending Boston University and graduating from Yale with “a fancy art degree” Kevin stepped away from painting for about a decade. A decision that he reflects on as not being ready or willing to participate in the conversations happening in art at that moment. During that time he worked with ceramics—“working with sculpture made me look at painting as an object, not just as a picture” bringing shadow and dimension of objects into the composition of his painting that he would resume almost a decade later.

When Ford returned to painting the digital age was raging. His work is reminiscent of a zoomed in pixelated resolution, but for Ford it’s a reference to elemental, after imaging that happens when color sticks to the retina. His process involves a lot of destruction. Working on 30 paintings at a time to achieve 5 works. Composing a sort of alphabet of objects, Ford uses color as a deceptive medium to give the viewer just enough information to fill in the blank, but not enough to take away from the lived experience of that viewer. His paintings are somewhere between a memory and a glare. Looking out at the world, drawing it in his way, interpreting it through color and paint. 

Kevin recently gave up his beautiful, window filled, north exposure studio to pay for therapy and to move his studio home. Feeling comfortable in a space and away from pressure of having to go somewhere to create was a breakthrough in his practice. “I only want to make a painting if I feel like it needs to be made. If I don’t have a reason for making the painting, it doesn’t need to exist.”