Artists: A - G: Kevin Finklea

There were many things I elected not to include or simply to put aside in the last two years of preparing work for this show. Reductive work of the type that I make requires a focused vigilance in this regard. One needs to constantly remove extraneous elements and unnecessary details. I knew that I wanted to simply paint the color brown. So I am supposed to be thinking about brown and why that is important to me. My first lover was brown. That seems to be important. And the first dog I ever connected with was brown. His name was Bruno and I will always remember him. I recall being forced to paint a beautiful wooden floor brown, which I clearly remember finding fascinating, as I couldn’t understand why I was making something already brown another shade of obviously inferior brown. But these paintings don’t seem to have anything to do with that. So what was I trying to remember?

It’s My Idea of Love is my first attempt at grappling with these seemingly fragmented issues of painting the color brown. I have done so with the idea that this will refer to landscape painting or at least superficially so. My need to paint brown has something to do with those things I adore. In this work the color brown functions as both the ground and foil for complex high-keyed colors; while also being the stand-in for those things I desire. Here I have utilized almost no brown paint in making the brown colors you see. The color is largely produced by mixing very intense pigments and it is my notion of what constitutes a contemporary landscape. I’ve attempted to push the color relations to a nearly hallucinogenic drug heightened state. The color combinations also refer to my memory of specific places traveled in the last two years, hence the inclusion of place names in the titles.

Kevin Finklea received his BA at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions: P.S.1 (MoMA), Long Island City, NY; Sydney Non-Objective, Sydney, Australia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Recent publications: Crozier Fine Arts Inc. New York, NY and New American Paintings, The open Studios Press. Recent acquisition: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Permanent Contemporary Art Development Collection, Philadelphia, PA.