Today, we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Inman.
Hi Kevin, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grew up as a nerd, then attended a college for nerds and joined a career path for nerds. During my quarter-life crisis, fearing I had lost my sparkle, I started taking night classes. Eventually, I pursued an MFA.
I got into painting out of boredom. When I was a child, I was relentlessly bad at sports and bored with them, but my parents didn’t want me in the house. So, I think it was a natural progression from hanging out in the woods with a book to, many years later, becoming interested in painting my surroundings.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t really want to get into my personal life, but I will say this. For a lot of people, in any kind of art or humanities, all the creative fields are an afterthought in their education. I think that’s a shame.
With my own students who are adults I see a lot of people who didn’t get a chance to develop their talents at an earlier age and I think it leads to frustration when you are an adult.
You can learn a lot of techniques online these days, but you need to be able to fit art into an overall understanding of the world. I think that is where an excessive focus on STEM is failing students.
Thanks. What else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I spent quite a lot of time wandering (and drawing) the city of Valencia, Spain when I was a student there. The urban environment does it for me, aesthetically but also because there are layers of meaning in the cityscape. Layers of memory and experience.
San Diego is a much newer city, of course, but it still appeals as subject matter. Painting, for me, is an activity. There’s a sort of clash between painting as an activity like I do it and the pseudo-intellectualism you see so often in artist statements.
Most of my work is intimately scaled paintings that I create outside on location. I’m a redhead, so I’m swaddled from head to toe in UPF gear like one of the people in Dune. The first rule of landscape painting is to get in the shade.
Trash cans are the cows of urban painting.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you, and can you share any important lessons or epiphanies with us?
In Italian art history, there is a succession of plagues. From the Black Death in the 1340s and on until the 1700s, every generation or so, this disease would come back and wipe out a ton of people somewhere in Europe.
Knowing how historical plagues impacted people living in those societies or how they impacted art did not prepare me in any way for living through an ongoing pandemic like we are now. Maybe it has helped me better understand, on a personal level, why so much art was created in response to those traumatic events.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kevininman.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inman.kevin/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevininman/
- Other: http://kevininmanart.etsy.com
