who & what & why
who
i was born in Georgia in 1963. i grew up in New Jersey, Hawaii, Kansas and Virginia. i've been in San Francisco since 1993. i started working on glass in 1989, when my upstairs neighbor in New York showed me how he did his work. i spend most of my spare money paying studio rent and buying paint, brushes and metal leaf.
what
my large pieces are made on wood-framed window panes. i keep the weathered state of the the window frame intact because the chipped and worn paint tells its own story. at most, i sand the frames a bit so no one gets a splinter.
i create my own or use found objects as templates. i make my pictures using acrylic medium & paint, enamel, metal leaf and appropriated paper.
i tend to work in spurts. when i decide to make a piece i hop into it without much of a plan, seeing where it goes or doesn't as it comes together. in a way, the pieces make themselves, providing me the direction and telling me where they want to go. this direction often leads the charge of a series of pieces using similar templates, shapes and colors.
my work is in several personal collections in the city of San Francisco. my work is also held in collections in Anchorage, Hokum and Jarfalla (Sweden), Kea'au, London, Los Angeles, Miami, the city and suburbs of New York, urban and rural North Carolina, Oakland, Portland, Seattle and Washington, DC.
why
light is essential to the work; it helps me break through the rigidity imposed by the use geometric shapes. i use layers of reflective materials that add to and alter the light already reflecting from the glass. the pieces are, in essence, a series of layers: pattern, shine, reflection and color, all intended to draw viewers closer, to examine, to see themselves reflected in and from the work.
i prefer to make large pieces that i put together on old wood-framed windows. the windows i work with have their own stories to tell, stories written well before i begin using the windows to tell my stories. these windows have been looked through from both sides so there's an easily missed narrative in their histories. people have observed their environments through these windows, while their environments observed them through the outside of the glass. i think that my work is about making new narratives by creating the beginning of the window's new history."
- kevin p. mosley, 2011
photos on this page courtesy Mark Roy Randal