Earl Grenville Killeen
Artist's Statement
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Art is what got me through a stress-filled childhood and a dislocated youth. From an early age, my most treasured resources were the books of artworks that I pored over, figuring out – by a process of dissecting and digesting – how colors, textures, values, and composition work, and learning how to put my understandings into practice by continually working at it and making mistakes. Mistakes, I came to appreciate, are great teachers of what doesn’t work, of patience and perseverance and anger management (like, how many times can you throw a work-in-progress across the studio before thinking: maybe there’s a better way . . . ), but also how mistakes can reveal themselves to be new techniques. |
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For example, my exasperation with frisket’s penchant for picking up and randomly depositing bits and speckles of not-quite-dry-enough paint gave way to a realization that my painting was left with a surface texture that I could not purposely create with a brush. Now I invite the frisket to do its thing.
Using a small power sander in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a botched watercolor by removing overworked layers of paint, I discovered – and have come to rely on -- the sander’s facility to amalgamate and burnish colors, as well as to reveal glimpses of under-layers. Another experiment in texturing involves spreading beach sand over a painting’s surface, spraying it with water, and scraping it off with a palette knife when dry. The results of these techniques share an element of potential surprise. |
It’s nice that making art, even after seventy, is still an adventure.
. Another part of this adventure – especially, to my happy surprise, in recent years – has been the opportunity to be connected to so many creative and supportive people, whether in venues that I can attend physically, or in the virtual meeting places online. While nothing beats seeing the actual works, and artists and viewers, in a gallery setting, I’m very much enjoying my virtual walks through online exhibits and my daily scrolls through Instagram, viewing art and exchanging comments and encouragement. These encounters are a wonderful source of involvement and inspiration. At the same time, I believe that, to be an artist, you have to be a visionary; to be a visionary, you have to ignore other people’s versions of vision. |
