Arthur b. Kennickell
As others have often remarked, sometimes it is perhaps best that artists say as little as possible about themselves and their work. I mostly agree with this, but it may be unfair to expect someone new to the work here to make the effort to entirely invent their way in, though invention to some degree is essential. With this in mind, I offer a brief introduction to me and my work.
I was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1948 and grew up there, before leaving for college in Chicago. After that I never returned for very long. While I lived there, Savannah seemed to me a town with beautiful and not broadly appreciated architecture in varying degrees of decay, large amounts of gorgeous pristine marshland and other nature, many very bad habits of thinking, and some transcendent attitudes too often wrapped up in a bitter cover. Everything felt very ingrown with everything else, much like the complex ecology of a swamp, as I visualized it then. As I remarked later to a poet from one of the sister states to the west, swamps like hers and mine can be full of really frightening creatures of all sorts, but sometimes that overheated mix produces improbably dazzling flowers that are somehow not eaten or destroyed immediately. The flowers most present to me were thoughts. Trying to make sense of the positive and negative heartbeats of this mental and physical world would occupy a large space in the beginning of my life as an artist. The past is never really left behind, but of course much has changed for me and those places since then. I credit my dear friends and a few family members for keeping me going.
Most of my work is concerned with impressions of human forms or the sensations of being present in a human form. This is perhaps most obvious in my earliest work. I have never been interested in trying to make copies of the objects or people around me. Altered photographs and collages are the closest I have gone in that direction—hardly a close approach, as I hope you will see. Sometimes people have mistaken some of my works as influenced by surrealism—Joseph Cornell might be a better connection, though I think I have more of a drive toward color and toward more obviously heated arrangements. Someone once described my paintings as “erotic vegetables”—that gave me an easy tag line for a while, but only as a joke. Though I have broad interest in many periods of art, I am especially fond of William Blake and others in his circle and Italian art from the time of Giotto through the transcendence of the baroque period. There are aspects of those sensibilities in which I feel at home. But being a child of the 20th Century and having absorbed many of its (and later) cultural and visual currents, I see the earlier and more recent work from many perspectives, which is also reflected in a feeling and often an appearance in my own work of what might pass for abstraction. This too-misused term, I think, is for me a gateway for encompassing a reality in our time, certainly in my time. The realities in my art are what may be called “queered” ones, though not necessarily sexually so. Bent in many dimensions. I hope you will enjoy looking at my creatures. For me, they are breathing.
This website is deliberately not constructed as a “store” or a source of overstimulation. You are not asked to buy anything or do anything else except whatever your interest draws on you to do. If you have comments or questions, you are welcome to use the Contact page to write to me. Usually, I will respond soon.
Thanks for visiting.