About Kevan

Statement:

There are things I don’t know how to say with words.

My interaction with the canvas centers around the problem of articulation: how so much that our bodies synthesize feels out of reach with limited, verbal language. The paintings I make stumble earnestly towards a pronounced connectedness. Drawing and moving color around I sit patiently on the floor, metaphorically holding hands with the Present Tense -- allowing the tensions that arrive to have space and agency and voice. Exploring this fragile space, wholly engaged, until wonder may appear.

I use pencils and pastels, brooms and the handles of broken wooden tools, I finger paint with pigments and mediums until textures and contrasts form a deep harmony, I use ruined paint brushes to create marks I couldn't intentionally make, until a structure of understanding and deep compassion arises on the canvas, and then I stop.

bio:

Kevan Joseph O’Connor (b. 1988) is a painter who lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. He creates meditative, gestural abstract images, made with a tactile immediacy. Visually striking interactions of exaggerated and desperate color studies build richly textured compositions. After earning his BA in writing and creative literature in 2011, he returned to his passion for visual art, determinedly seeking a non-verbal way to articulate experience and awareness. His paintings play with prelinguistic communication as a means of reconciling memory and empathy along a healing path towards compassion.