who & what & why
who
kevin was born in Georgia in 1963. an Army brat to the core, he grew up in Georgia, New Jersey, Hawaii, Kansas and Virginia. kevin is gladly without any formal art education or training, having studied social work instead. to pay the rent and buy the paint and brushes and metal leaf, kevin works as a harm reduction counselor and health educator.
what
most often, kevin makes pictures on found glass. for large pieces he prefers wood-framed window panes. kevin feels that windows tell a story in and of themselves, having been looked through from both sides; people looking out into their environment and their environment looking back at them.
when he's making smaller pieces, kevin scours thrift shops and estate sales where he looks for abandoned picture frames. when he can, he leaves whatever was framed therein behind the piece when the glass is returned to its frame and hung for display. regardless the size or provenance, kevin tries to keep the weathered and worn state of the the window or picture frames intact, at most sanding them a bit so no one gets a splinter.
now and again he makes pieces on and with both found and purchased paper. this can be a frustrating exercise for kevin, given the flexibility and ephemeral nature of paper in comparison to the rigid though liquid nature of glass.
kevin uses a variety of found objects as templates and uses acrylic paint, metal leaf and appropriated paper. he tends to work in spurts and when he decides to make a piece he just hops into it without too much of a plan. this way he can get, be and stay excited about a piece, seeing where it goes or doesn't as it comes together.
recently, kevin received some commissions. first he was asked to make a series of four botanical images for photo contest winners who subscribe to an online horticultural journal. most recently he crafted a piece involving wrestling singlets, made for someone who gave the piece to a friend as a gift; kevin was surprised and pleased to meet the recipient of this piece several months later.
as he prefers not to pay for both housing and a dedicated studio space, kevin paints at home. and in so doing he occupies a goodly portion of the living room in the apartment he shares with his partner.
kevin's work is in several personal collections in the city of San Francisco. his work is also held in collections in Anchorage (Alaska), Hokum and Jarfalla (both in Sweden), Kea'au (Hawaii), London, Los Angeles, Miami, the city and suburbs of New York, urban and rural North Carolina, Portland (Oregon), Seattle and Washington, DC.
why
making art ought to be, i think, an interesting and pleasant process of the artist. and so i am more intrigued by and pleased with more recent efforts and the resulting work. with this in mind, i now spend my time making large pieces that are explosions of shapes and colors and reflective silver leaf.
in 2007, i made a piece that had nothing literal in it or on it or to it. it was seemingly simple. just repetition of a geometric shape and a series of colors, and at first i thought myself lazy and bored. i kept putting in layer after layer and intuiting my way around placement and color choice and pattern repetition. it dawned on me slowly that my head had been flooded with memories of childhood. mostly these were memories about adults other than my parents, adults who had a positive regard for me, as well as a positive influence on me, when i was a child. these adults are, or were, teachers. teachers who somehow understood me, letting me explore and learn as i needed to instead of cramming me into an ill-fitting lesson plan required by the local Board of Education.
that first piece, called 'Mrs. Mayer,' which was shown in June and sold in July 2007, is named for the brilliantly focused and attentive woman who taught both my third and sixth grade classes at Saint Paul's Lutheran School in Leavenworth, Kansas. 'Mrs. Mayer' was followed by a series of five other pieces, non-figurative all, named for another teacher at Saint Paul's as well as teachers from Our Lady of Sorrows School in Hawaii and Lake Braddock Secondary in Virginia.
purposeful art making started for me in the late 90s, when i began to make pictures of hypermasculine iconography. in a conscious riff, rip and run on Touko Laaksonen, i offer overly muscled dudes wearing incredibly small and hugely bulging swim trunks. or the same dudes without the constraint of swim trunks, their impossibly large genitals projecting forward into space. a field of white briefs. an array of jock straps. a series of penises offering up either or both of the fluids they're known to release.
for now i'm enjoying simple geometry and color composition. it's a more intuitive process and that means much more freedom to create in a way that just flows. but it's likely i'll still make pictures of men and, more particularly, their trappings." - kevin p. mosley
