Brilliance in the Mundane is an exhibition curated in partnership with Park Towne Place. It features five artists, Kevin Broad, Sean Irwin, Bruce Hoffman, Warren Muller, and Gerri Spilka, who celebrate the beauty inherent in the everyday.
Kevin Broad is a Philadelphia-based artist whose pieces are inspired by the world around him, both urban and natural. His constant experimentation with materials and techniques brings an expressive, tactile quality to his work.
Why do you choose to make your own paint? What materials and techniques do you use?
“In 1984 I had a job working at South Street Art Supply. At that time this store in Philadelphia was a purveyer of the finest art materials for painters. I would have to fill orders when artists purchased raw pigments, and the brilliance of some of these powders really intrigued me. Experience with various mediums was something I was beginning to study. I left that job and moved to the countryside where I was from, and I tried to make a career as an artist but could hardly finish one drawing. Purposely I selected watercolors with which to develop some sort of style, and I made myself finish one painting in one session, mostly landscapes, one after the other. I started collecting powdered pigments and began to grind my own paints. I added white to my pallet and could now play with translucency and opacity within the painting. My goal was to eventually work in oil, so I took a few deliberate steps to get there-from watercolor to gauche, then to egg tempera which allowed emulsification of oil. Eventually I was grinding my own oil colors which gave me so much intimacy in handling the paint.
Also I have worked in fresco, the purest form of applying paint to a surface, where the pigments are ground in just water and strokes of color are locked into the surface of the lime plaster as it dries.
Today I buy the best oil colors that I can. As I’ve developed techniques for working, I will in time turn on all of this experience and deconstruct what has worked for me in the past. This is my lifelong search to discover what is sublime, genuine and essential.”
Do specific places and landscapes influence your work?
“There was a lot of beautiful countryside near where I grew up. My grandparents had a farm, and from their front porch you could look over a vast valley of fields and rolling hills, with the Blue Mountain on the horizon. As a young child I started art lessons and was shown landscapes by Inness and Corot, and then Cezanne. I would sit on the porch of the farmhouse and imagine, how would I mix that blue color of that mountain? Every time I would look away and back again, the color would be different!
Like this, I think an artist’s sensitivities to beauty are inherent to very early sensations of beauty. I heard and felt my mother’s beautiful singing even before I was born. I could stare and stare at the colors of beautiful stained glass windows in church when I was a kid. I’ll always remember the abstract pattern on a crazy lamp my parents had in their living room, and the paint by number paintings on the wall. In my mind’s eye I see light passing through a room or nature. I will always gravitate toward warmth and water.
On my first trip to Europe, we were in France, taking the train from Paris to Arles in Provence. (I had to see where Van Gogh painted!) Before my eyes the landscape changed and I felt like I was inside an impressionist painting, the colors were so vivid. Someone told me that Monet, when he first arrived in the South of France, proclaimed that he needed to throw away all of his colors and just paint with crushed jewels. I believed it. To contrast, since then I’ve worked in Iceland a few times, and there I could really feel the energy of the earth. I tried to use these powerful pigments directly in my paintings.”
What everyday experiences or materials have you been inspired by recently?
“Sometimes as a painter I am reaching out, and other times I am reaching in. I feel happy-go-lucky to be traveling and paint because I am inspired by a scene. Sometimes in my studio I will visually embrace objects that have some meaning or interest to my eye and then paint what I see. I still also want to just paint people! Other times I will work without an idea and try to dissect the paint. These paintings are a document of the experience, and frankly each day that I work I am different in some way. What is unique about any given moment while I am painting is as good a subject as any.”
