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James Kerry Baldwin
Kerry has been an artist his entire life. It has taken a global pandemic in order to realize this, however.
In Seattle where he grew up, nature and the arts were everywhere. An aspiring architect from school age, Kerry’s talent in art and design led him to the University of Arizona’s Architecture school for 2 years before, having become a young father, he switched to study business. The allure of New York City soon beckoned, where working with several of Wall Street’s top hedge funds consumed his time, as did looking after his young family. Limited by lack of time and space plus the hustle of New York life, he spent nights and weekends avidly absorbing the city’s art DNA: at exhibitions, museums, touring city streets, and following many artists and their work, all the while filing away images, emotions, and thoughts of his own art still to come.
In 2019, he would get his chance: in seeking a new balance between family, work, and art, Kerry moved to Europe with his wife Cecilia, setting up an art studio in Madrid, Spain. He could not possibly know that within months the world would change and in so doing, provide him a breakout moment as an artist.
During the pandemic months of 2020 and beyond, Kerry has experienced a torrent of productivity, passion, and energy in his painting. Art has become all-consuming, and at any time Kerry might be working on 5-10 different paintings, most often large canvases and diptychs of highly expressive color, with shapes and forms rooted in the figurative but driven through to simplified abstraction.
Through a fortuitous convergence of talent and an incredible network, Kerry now has artworks in collectors’ homes in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Phoenix, amongst others. He has been fortunate to exhibit in New York with Gobbi Fine Art, who continue to support his career and artistic development; and in Seattle WA, Southampton NY, and Vail CO. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair and JAN design magazine.
Kerry is a blessed father of 8 amazing sons and beautiful daughters who inspire him every day with their spirit and sense of wonder. In addition to painting, in his spare time Kerry is an avid runner, cyclist, surfer, general ocean enthusiast, music fiend, frequent volunteer, and advocate for social justice.
Process
Kerry paints with confidence and audacity, and with no discernible advance planning other than selecting one large canvas versus another. Faced with the blank canvas, the choice of colours and the covering of the empty space is often swift, and produces an initial layer of often surprising variegation and intensity. There is rarely any figurative drawing that occurs, purely instinctive colour selection and brushstrokes. Pausing and observing this initial setting of paint with a critical eye, deciding what is pleasing, what to highlight, what to cover, what to build on, produces in the next phase, forms and patterns that gradually start to define the theme and layout of the canvas. Seldom figurative even after the initial phase, the process is more about differing techniques of paint application- use of knives, rollers, sponges, dripping, pouring, scraping, even hosing- as much as additional colours enter the frame, with much careful observation in between bursts of activity which are always bold. The full space of the canvas is generally in play, and spatial distribution seems random to a viewer. There is certainly joyous experimentation and a relish for colour as well as patterns and effects of the paint that emerge; this appears very emotional painting with little rational logic applied.
Then, and then; sometimes in the moment with a shout of affirmation, more often after a canvas is set aside, looked at often, but not touched (weeks can elapse); then, then, after rotating a canvas every which way, observing the shapes and patterns, the perspectives and colour variations, a figurative scene or person can appear. The seemingly random paint application in individual planes and fields taken from the inner mind and visual memory has produced a figure, a landscape, an interior, deconstructed before but now identifiable in its whole.
Once spotted, the entire composition falls into place, the seemingly random forms and colours yielding to a harmony that is then highlighted with additional paint, in generally the finishing touches. Paint-pens may be used to define the forms further with a sure hand that is often cheekily cartoon-like; occasionally with pastels, sometimes with additional paint to highlight a specific view, occasionally with a colour wash to alter the hues somewhat. The completed paintings have a serene resolution, a product of this creative process. An incomplete painting is a question still waiting to be answered, and requires some patience to wait for the response. In the meantime, a new canvas beckons.
--Cecilia A.P. Mortimore
Praying Monk - Kerry James Baldwin
Praying Monk, 2024
Acrylic, Spray, Ink and Oils on Canvas
Size: 3 x 150 x 50 cm
Framed: 170 x 170 cm
release_alert Low Stock - 1 available
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