kb art collages

I have been an architect for the past 40 years and an artist for over 60 years. I’ve always had a passion for collecting pictures, cards, and books with art that caught my visual attention. I would go to the library and checkout art magazines and glean through them for articles and images to copy into my notebooks. During college, as I was refining my aesthetic sense, I started recognizing architects, artists, and musicians who were all part of one movement titled Bauhaus. The Bauhaus School was started in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Wiemar, Germany. The school was to be a Gesamtkunstwerk (or a ‘comprehensive artwork’) where all the arts would be taught integrally using this fundamental concept. The faculty included an ‘A-list’ of artists and designers including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Brurer, Gunta Stolzl, Johannes Itten, the Albers, Lionel Feininger, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and many more. I had found my ‘group’.

Other than the Bauhaus years (1919-1933), I have also been inspired by the de Stijl art / architecture movement (1917 - 1931); Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and the Suprematists (1913 - 1929); Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and the Fauves (1904 - 1910); Le Corbusier and the International Style ( beginning in the 1920s); and Frank Lloyd Wright.

After obtaining my architecture degree from LSU, I enrolled in a stained glass course. I love the process of making things and became engrossed with making glass panels. However, after a few years, even the tactile process that I loved, was working against my attention span. I needed a much quicker medium. So, just like in the old days when I was a kid, I started cutting colors, patterns, and text from old National Geographic magazines. But this time I was on a mission. I made many small scale studies, developing my compositional sense of balance with shapes, colors, and patterns. After several years, I began creating my own library stock of painted paper and have been at it ever since. I love working with the parameter that each sheet is unique and that there is a limited amount of each unique sheet. Throughout my work you will see that I frequently use variations on one color to create a larger color field.

Over the years, my work has progressed from building with blocks and tree house building to working in a variety of media including drawing, painting, stained glass, making collages, frame making, furniture and cabinetry making, and home remodeling. I honed my aesthetic with an architectural sense to design from ‘big picture’ down to the details. That process - combined with the freedom that comes with using forms, colors, and patterns – defines my visual language and process. In each piece, I strive for a balanced COMPOSITION of COLOR and PATTERN. Ultimately, if I have allowed you to pause and evaluate a particular composition of mine, then I feel I will have succeeded.

kb

About the Artist

Kevin is recently retired from architecture and is now pursuing his passion for art. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with his wife, Carol, an educator, and their dog Lucy. They have two grown children, Nathan and Rachel.