Ian Kimmerly

Gallery Affiliations: Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Stephanie Breitbard Fine Arts

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.iankimmerlyart.com

City / State: San Francisco, CA

The ideas for my paintings are born out of my interest in the relationships between images, how meaning is discovered through color, painted form, and juxtaposition. The contradictions and polarities I experience both in the day to day as well as in the painting process help in generating ideas as well as questions, which I then incorporate into my art. I am interested in how different images, as well as ideas, relate or contrast with one another; the conversation between abstraction and realism, symbolism and sentimentality.

The reference photos I work from (both found and self-taken), are used to compress multiple elements into each painting: TV images, snapshots from a walk down the street, billboards, people, landscapes, and buildings. In exploring how these images should be layered and painted, the relationship between content, form, and meaning is inevitably explored.

My paintings can look quite different from one another because my reference photos pull me in different directions in terms of subject matter. It is part of my process to maintain a dialogue with each painting, an openness to compositional decisions, as opposed to committing myself to a particular idea or destination. There are common themes that run throughout my work: the relationship between urbanism and isolation, memory, order, community and consumerism. I am motivated by a strong interest in formal issues, possibilities for paint application, the power of color as a constructive element. My ultimate goal is to mirror my relationship to a world where landscapes change as quickly as phone numbers.

Appearances