Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Grass. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Kevin Grass grew up in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a small river town about an hour southeast of St. Louis. Since there were no art supply stores nearby, Grass’s father, who worked as a grocery clerk, brought brown paper bags home for him to use as drawing paper. Using #2 pencils and ball-point pens, Grass worked obsessively without instruction to master representational drawing skills. Early subjects ranged widely, including narrative fantasy, landscapes, and traditional portraits.
At the age of 10, Grass was introduced to painting on canvas by his elementary school art teacher. After experimenting with oil and acrylic paints, Grass decided that he preferred the latter because acrylics dried quickly and did not required toxic thinners. It was not unusual to see him outdoors working on paintings with his typical array of supplies – Liquitex acrylics, canvas panels, cheap hobby brushes, and paper plate palettes.
In high school, Grass created a wide variety of commissioned works, ranging from portraits and landscapes to lettering for campaign signs and car decorations. One of the murals he assisted within downtown Ste. Genevieve still exists today. It has faded but shows that Grass had promise as a representational painter from an early age.
After becoming valedictorian of Ste. Genevieve High School, Grass began his formal art education at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He started as an architecture student, but his obsession with painting was so strong that he changed his major at the beginning of the second semester of his sophomore year. He received his undergraduate degree in drawing and painting in 1990 from Washington University on a full academic scholarship.
At the University of Georgia, he met his future wife, Michaela Oberlaender, in a Northern Renaissance art class. That course had an extensive impact on his life because it also introduced him to the narrative symbolism and the meticulous techniques of the Flemish masters that influence his work today. In his studio classes, Grass was encouraged to paint loosely and use oil paint, neither of which felt right to him, but it was an important stage in earning his master’s of fine art degree.
The fall after receiving his graduate degree, Grass began teaching art full-time at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia. In addition to teaching, he pursued corporate art commissions, regional juried shows and had his first solo museum exhibition. While teaching was new and exciting, it was always a means for him to be able to paint.
In August 1997, while his wife was expecting their son, Grass moved his family to the Tampa Bay region to accept a teaching post at St. Petersburg College in Florida. He still teaches full-time as an Associate Professor of Art on the Clearwater campus.
Kevin Grass made the switch back to painting in acrylics in 2001, a few years after his son Nicholas was born because he did not want the toxic fumes in his home. The other reason was because some of the oil pieces showed slight cracks in them after they were varnished, making them look as if they were already as old as the pieces by the Renaissance Masters. It took a while for Grass to be as skilled in acrylics as in oils, but now if you look at works in both media side by side, it is difficult to distinguish between them based on the medium alone.
Corporate and Percent for Art sales began to dry up in 2001 after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, so Grass began to focus his attention on figurative pieces that comment upon social issues of the day. These complex, thought-provoking images were well represented in juried and invitational regional and national exhibitions, galleries, and prestigious art publications. Crowds at international art fairs, such as SPECTRUM Miami and Artexpo in New York, were especially receptive to the work. The feedback about his work at these shows, with over 30,000 visitors, influenced themes for future artworks.
Late in 2019, as painting sales almost completely ceased and storage space began to run out in his studio, Grass decided that something needed to change. Lame Ducks is series of smaller, less complex images that retain the humor, narrative, and technical approach of the more involved figure paintings, using rubber ducks as the common thematic element. These visual puns are colorful, fun, and lend themselves more easily to marketing and commercial applications. The paintings are accompanied by a whole series of products available at the artist’s website www.kevingrass.art.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The most difficult aspect of working as a professional artist is finding a subject that will interest the public. For about 20 years, I worked on a series of representational figure paintings that dealt primarily with current social issues. The work got into juried exhibitions, won awards, and was published, but it was difficult to sell. Because a single painting could take anywhere from 200-300 hours, the work was very expensive, so few people could afford it. Most people found the subject matter interesting, but the images were not necessarily something that would work well in a private home.
In 2019, I decided to try work that was smaller and subjects that were more appealing in an effort to improve sales of originals and merchandise. The new series, “Lame Ducks,” is a collection of hyper-realistic narrative paintings in which yellow rubber ducks are the stars of the show. Themes for the paintings are based upon idioms that use the words duck, quack, fowl, bird, or their homonyms. While the paintings are still hyper-realistic, this represented a big change for me, so we had to start over again with regard to marketing and building a new audience. We are still in the early stages of introducing the work to the public, but responses seem promising. With any luck, we will begin seeing more progress within the next year.
Another significant problem is that I have a full-time job in addition to creating and marketing my artwork. I work in my field as an Associate Professor of Art at St. Petersburg College’s Clearwater campus. While teaching is a great way to support myself and my family, it requires a lot of time and energy, leaving little time to devote to my art business. The paintings are labor-intensive, usually taking between 50 to 100 hours to complete. Fortunately, my wife, who teaches college art history courses part-time, takes care of the marketing.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Lame Ducks is a series of hyper-realistic narrative paintings in which yellow rubber ducks are the stars of the show. Themes for the paintings are based upon idioms that use the words duck, quack, fowl, bird, or their homonyms. These visual puns poke fun at language, illustrating the disconnect between intended and literal meanings. The resulting images are witty, humorous, and sometimes ironic. The puns are often worthy of inciting groans, hence the inclusion of the word Lame in the title for the series.
The execution of the paintings shares more in common with traditional academic painting than the graphic, cliched approach typically applied to similar themes in Pop Art. Paintings in the Lame Ducks series are painted directly from still lifes or combinations of still lifes and photographic references. Color is built up in layers using brushes with fine, soft hair, with techniques employed by contemporary photorealist artists and 15th-century Flemish painters. The goal is to create a convincing illusion of light, form, and space that brings the scene to life for the viewer.
While the painting techniques stem from fine art, the Lame Ducks series is not meant to be taken too seriously. The goal is to create humorous, entertaining images with a diversity of narratives that will have broad appeal. People are facing grave problems today and humor can help make things a little better.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
The best way is to purchase my work. Not everyone can afford an original painting, so we offer prints and variety of merchandise that features the paintings, including tote bags, coffee mugs, T-shirts, throw pillows, phone cases, calendars, and ornaments. It is also very helpful for people to share my posts because the more people that I reach, the more likely that I will find people that will be interested in purchasing original artwork and merchandise.
Pricing:
- Original work ranges from $800 to $70,000 for original paintings. Paintings in the Lame Ducks series, which are 16 x 20 inches, retail for $3,000.
- Merchandise ranges from $8.00 for metal magnets to over $2,000 for a 40 x 50 inch print on 1/4 inch acrylic.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kevingrass.art
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KevinGrassFineArt
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevinGrass11
