Passion for the palette: Ken Dewaard embarks on a marathon painting party
Passion for the palette
Ken Dewaard embarks on a marathon painting party
by Joseph Hart
If the mental image you have filed under “artist” involves black turtlenecks, anti-social behavior, and the dark anguish of the midnight soul, you’ll need to open a new folder for Ken DeWaard. At 45, the painter possesses a sunny disposition and a trim, athletic frame leftover from his days as a competitive basketball player. He carries himself with a certain reserve that disguises
itself as good manners. “I’m passionate about art,” he says. “I’ve just never been very artsy fartsy.”
As a painter, he is tireless. He recently completed a commission of eight epic landscapes for the lobby of Viroqua’s Temple Theatre, which will be unveiled to the public at a ceremony on July 8. The murals are monumental—some of them more than 9 by 5 feet—and took two years to complete. The paint had hardly dried on the murals when DeWaard embarked on another artistic marathon. He set himself the task, during the month of June, to paint one local scene every day. Some people might have taken a week off.
I met up with DeWaard toward the end of the month as he prepared to paint his scene of the day: a line of towels and bathing togs strung between two trees at the campground of Sidie Hollow Park. As he filled a palette with daubs of paint, he says that the task of making 30 paintings in 30 days has been more challenging than he expected. “Maybe I was crazy,” he admits. “On the weekends, I like to spend my time with my family, so I’ve been painting the horses.” DeWaard’s wife Kate keeps several. The paintings, which measure 9 inches by 12, would sell in a gallery for $1,000. DeWaard will sell them for $250 each at a public gallery reception on July 13.
DeWaard paints with a box easel, which folds up neatly to contain his paints and tools. To shade his work, he affixes a black umbrella to the easel’s top, and to shade his eyes he wears a broad brimmed hat. As he begins to layer on the paint, a handful of children (including his own; he and Kate have four) gather to watch. It’s a familiar accompaniment. He often draws a crowd of onlookers.
He works quickly, sketching in the larger forms of the piece with charcoal to balance the symmetry of the composition. Then he adds blocks of color, and narrows down to the finer details. The process of creating a painting from life, he says, boils down to the question of what to leave out. “Early on I tried to paint in a very realistic style,” he says. “I’ve realized that the art comes in simplifying the scene. Otherwise, it’s overwhelming.” As he dips his brush into the paint, hovers it a moment over the surface of the painting, and then dabs into the scene, his movements bring to mind the darting of a hummingbird, and the hummingbird’s compressed and fluid energy. It takes DeWaard about two hours to complete a small painting.
DeWaard grew up in a suburb south of Chicago. His father worked in a print shop, checking color separations, but he seldom brought his work home. “It’s still surprising to him that I can actually make a living as an artist,” DeWaard says. Near the family home was a forest preserve, where the painter honed an early appreciation of nature.
For as long as he can remember, he’s paired twin passions for basketball and art. While he always thought of art as his first career, he spent some time chasing the dream of a professional career on the court. He earned a basketball scholarship to Ohio Western Illinois University, where he played forward, and faced down men much taller than him. “At a certain point, I knew I wasn’t going to play professionally,” he says. “I’m only six-four.” Instead, he pursued his painting skills to Chicago’s American Academy of Art, and ultimately, into his life as a full-time artist.
Art and b-ball is less an odd couple than it sounds. Like an athlete, DeWaard’s work is to master a thousand, intuitive micro-decisions—the balance of the shapes, the hue and saturation of the colors, and especially, the play of light on his subjects. Only then can the hummingbird find nectar.
“I don’t just paint pretty little pictures,” he says. “Shape, design, color—that’s part of the magic. There’s passion in color, there’s excitement.” He describes the perfect flow he experiences during the creation of a painting as similar to the experience of a great athlete on the court. “You see it in Jordon, where he’s playing so hard his tongue is hanging out and he’s out of his mind,” he says. “It’s passion again. If you have to analyze it, it misses the point.” kfp
Ken DeWaard’s eight murals for the Temple Theatre will be unveiled at a public ceremony on July 8,7:30 p.m. His painting-a-day works from the month of June can be viewed online at www.kendewaard.com/30in30.htm; DeWaard will host an open studio on July 13, from 5 to 8 p.m., where he will sell the paintings unframed for $250 each.
