Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Dec 24, 2010; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

Serious, but whimsical David Kearns uses visible strokes, texture and pastel colors to entice the viewer Art Issues

MALIN WILSON-POWELL

For the Journal

Painter David Kearns disarms with candy colors and whimsy. Although he can obviously move paint around with panache and flair, there is a notable suspicion andreluctance to fully exploit his innate skills. And, this turns out, after all, to be a good thing. It was sheer serendipity that the artist was visiting from Vermont and inresidence at the gallery when I went to review his current exhibition. Kearns confirmed he was “decidedly anti-color for a long time.”

Most of the 23 works on view at the 222 Shelby Street Gallery were completed during a recent residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and with only one exceptionthey revel in bright, luminous, odd color. Kearns’ scrawls, scumbles, puddles, dabs and clumps of thick paint feel so immediate that it seems you can smell the paintdrying. Yet, this is clearly not the case since Kearns only uses fast-drying acrylic paints rather than slow-drying oils.

There are multiple discrepancies and foils in Kearns’ idiosyncratic vision. He pays homage to the work of Philip Guston (1913-1980) by conflating all three phases ofGuston’s career. During the 1930s and ’40s, when Guston worked on murals in the American regionalist and Mexican modernist vain, he also relied on surrealist Giorgiode Chirico for a strange and enigmatic compositional dissonance, that somehow magically coheres. Kearns’ paintings have the same disparate ennui and can be viewedas surrealistic minimurals. Kearns’ ambitious if downsized murals are wall-like in their frontality, sometimes literally depicting walls, especially the wall of his studio,along with flattened scenes of impossible menageries.

Kearns has many signature quirks and clearly enjoys madly scribbling squarish blocks of color, most of them representing masses of tree foliage on squat trunks. Theseevoke the swirling frenzy of a crayon in a child’s hand and also resemble bright gestural blobs afloat in Guston’s Abstract Expressionist canvasses.

However, it is the “dumb,” animated, cartoony character of Kearns’ paintings that is the most obvious legacy from Guston’s late period, when in ominous, unnervingcanvasses Guston depicted himself as a puzzled Rumpelstiltskin who smoked fiendishly and was haunted by hooded Klansmen. Kearns’ small painting titled “Wild andCrazy Guy” of a block-head with three-eyes is an amalgamation of Guston’s one-eyed artist blockhead as well as Japanese anime of aliens, Steve Martin’s comediccharacter, and — for New Mexicans — reminiscent of a pastel Kachina head wearing plaid. Yikes! It works, but how?

While Guston’s late paintings are primarily interiors with bare light bulbs and piles of worn-out work boots, Kearns’ fantasies are inhabited by signature stunted trees(including palm trees), fragments of classical columns, mangy black and blue animals, bottles, birds and many, many ducks, for which the show is named. Regarding histeensy profiles of ducks in odd colors Kearns said, “As deadly serious as I take painting, I’ve always been interested in work that used humor, for its own sake asentertainment and also as a means to lower people’s guard and/or disarm certain ‘awful truths.’ There is the comedy cliché, I think attributed to the Marx Brothers,about the inherently funny quality of ducks, and even the word ‘duck’ itself.”

The sinister nature of Kearns’ work is not as blatant as Guston’s, but it is there. Along with the thrill and sureness in Kearns’ painterly strokes comes a message ofurgency to paint and the recognition that to create means navigating a landscape strewn with remnants of the past. In a large painting of his studio titled “Among theRuins,” Kearns features a George Stubbs composition with an incongruous zebra. Kearns would have seen Stubbs’ large canvas at the British Art Center at YaleUniversity, where he received his bachelor’s degree in studio art. Stubbs was the ultimate 18th century painter of horses, hounds and exotic animals kept by Britisharistocrats. Kearns turns the luxe painting of Stubbs, who was known for painting animals more accurately than any other artist, into a wonky, laughable “Gilligan’sIsland” version of privilege and wealth.

Kearns paints in small town Vermont without powerful patrons to commission grand and glamorous portraits of prize animals, and his animals include a scruffy alley cat,distant flocks of birds, tabletop curios, and his cartoon duck. His “deadly serious” paintings percolate with the notion that the traditions of making art and culture arepiecemeal, highly provisional, impermanent, and wobbly by nature. Many of Kearns’ compositions seem to tremble with house-of-cards precariousness. Best, maybe, tohold your breath when looking at them.

At Yale, Kearns was schooled in Josef Albers’ “Interactions of Color.” While Albers always used blocks of solid rich pigments mixed according to the established colorwheel of complementary colors — red/ green, yellow/violet, blue/orange — Kearns turned to airbrush inks to build his personal palette. He didn’t use painter’s preparedtubes of paint, but mixed his own pigments employing the “process” colors of magenta, cyan and pale lemon yellow used by commercial printers. These are the threebasic colors — along with black — that are used by every desktop color computer printer, squirted out in dpi’s (dots per inch) to blend in an approximation of every color.Kearn’s preferred “black” or neutral color is a raw umber gray.

Most of the colors in Kearns’ paintings look different than other painters because of this selftaught translation from one color system to another. Similarly, hisiconography is deeply personal and eccentric. Although highly original, Kearns’ work brings to mind the decorative work of two other American painters of utterly uniqueepicurean visions. The first is Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), who painted delightful high-keyed canvasses of life as a series of such private pursuits as picnics, boatingparties, and ladies lounging. The other is contemporary painter Thomas Trosch whose fanciful compositions of 1950s salons of fashionable women have AE paintings andbiomorphic sculptures in the background.

The monochromatic “West Oakland” is a testimony to the artist’s skill and discipline sans color. It is a drawing/painting hybrid depicting a derelict alley in Oakland, Calif.,a place Kearns visits frequently. Here you see how his fluid, chocolate-brown line builds strong structures in a bare bones rendition without the distraction of his wild,accomplished palette. You also can see he’s an artist who has been wary of the seductions of color, who finds his own back door approach and who has eschewedwell-traveled ways of moving forward. If you go

WHAT: “Painting Groucho’s Duck: David Kearns” WHERE: 222 Shelby Street Gallery WHEN: Will continue through Feb. 2. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Byappointment Sunday and Monday, call 505-699-2833. COST: Free CONTACT: 982-8889 or www.222shelbystreet.com

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“Studio I” is a 2010 acrylic on paper by David Kearns.

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COURTESY 222 SHELBY STREET GALLERY

“After the Conquest” is a 2010 acrylic on board by David Kearns.

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