Kevin Stuart

Region: Midwest

The social contract of public spaces allows us to see another human being as only a figure in space. This is unreasonable to me. My paintings have become me thinking about people through the act of painting. My goal in revisiting people I have sketched in public spaces is to paint them as people with complex subjectivities and beautiful lives. Each person I encounter is so much more than a figure in space. When we feel invisible, as in a public space, we don’t put on a show for anyone, and can appear to one another as a series of potentialities. The narratives presented in these paintings clue in to an aspect of each person, but never offer an endpoint. The narratives end as soon as they begin, because the potentialities people offer are wonderful and inexhaustible, something I’ll never fully understand.