Kessler works - NYU Medical Center, NYC - placed by Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia

Kessler works - NYU Madical Center, NYC - placed by Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia

Aspengrove, 84" x 110"

Here is a short video doc of the assembly of Aspengrove which is a five-panel piece measuring 84" x 110" with each panel being 84'x22". The music was produced by my son Andre.

Peaceful Warrior - 1981, by Michael Kessler

"Peaceful Warrior" (1980-83) a painting by Michael Kessler Back in 1980 when I was living in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania an idea came to me. That idea was to generate a large series of paintings with each individual work being the same format. So each single piece of art would be a small panel Measuring 16" x 20" placed inside a sturdy redwood frame which was to be four inches wide. I began by producing about 30 of these panels with wide redwood frames and then hung them salon-style on a large studio wall. For the next four years I would generate these works and elements would migrate from one painting to the other. The parameters were set wide such that the images could range from extremely complex to simple or very representational to completely abstract. In other words my intention was to allow images to manifest with little regard for stylistic consistency. I was reading Jung and became fascinated with the idea of the subconscious leading to the collective unconscious and wanted to use these paintings as a way to drill down into that layer of awareness. Whether it is literally possible for an individual to tap the collective unconscious will remain a question, but from an Art perspective it was entirely possible. This exercise was extremely productive and proved to be filled with discovery and excitement. "Peaceful Warrior" was a unique and singular painting within this context as it was the only one to contain a human figure. What's more, that figure was a portrait of myself, so it was the only self-portrait in a group of paintings which numbered to about hundred. Oddly enough, in 1980 there was a book published with the title "'Way of the Peaceful Warrior" by Dan Millman which had modest sales until it was later published by Hal Kramer and then became a bestseller. The Cover of the book has a figure with arms outstretched and back to the viewer. I had never heard of the book nor had I seen the cover when I produced my painting called "Peaceful Warrior" with MY figure featured, arms outstretched, back to the viewer. In 2006 "Peaceful Warrior" the film was released and of course millions viewed it and the DVD again contains an image of a figure with arms outstretched, back to the viewer. Was this just a strange coincidence? I suspect so however as I stated above my initial intention was to drill down to the collective unconscious so is that what happened? Was I somehow able to do a mind-meld with the author Dan Millman? Back in this period of time when I was making these paintings I did not have any preconceptions and did no planning. Each painting was improvised. I would start the morning by grabbing a random work off the wall. I would take it up to my studio room and place it on the wall, turning it around and around. Then I would layer up the paint and scrape away until I found an image. That's exactly how I found my own figure within this abstracted landscape which manifest exactly how I felt at that time about being alive and surrounded by an incomprehensibly awesome universe. The painting is about being mystified and perplexed by the vast unknown. Why the title "Peaceful Warrior"? I felt like a peaceful warrior in those days. I was about 25 years old when I painted the picture and at that time I made my living as a school bus driver, which paid about $5,000 per year. I was living in Fleetwood in a lousy apartment with air that stank to high heaven from the tannery next-door. They used strong chemicals in the tannery like lacquer. Every day I wrestled with demons and tried to produce paintings. What were the demons that I wrestled with? There were many such as depression, anxiety, fear, greed, and doubt. For eight years I lived and worked there in Fleetwood producing many of these small works with heavy frames. In 1984 I was invited by Jack Tilton to exhibit them in Betty Parson's old gallery on 57th St. In the Big Apple. The first piece that sold was to the curator of the Newark Museum of Art.

On view at Gallery MAR in Park City, Utah -March 2013

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Location:Gallery MAR, Park City

Painting as Journaling

My way of experiencing the world is to take things apart and put them back together visually. My paintings documents that process. As I travel the world I deconstruct and reconstruct everything I see. What happens is lots of disparate elements are orchestrated and brought into balance. My paintings are a record of my observations. Painting for me is a way of exercising my memory as well as my imagination. The paintings are built-up of many layers of visual information which is carefully integrated and culled from my recollections. In the process of painting I utilize many unconventional tools such as trowels and knives. The image is primarily derived from texture. Color combination are pulled from observations of nature. My paintings are my Journal.



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Location:Wailea-Makena,United States

New review from Park City

Exhibition Review: Park City
The Occasion of Hybrid Art
Michael Kessler at Gallery MAR
by Geoff Wichert

During the twentieth century, someone was always looking around and calling what he saw “the death of art.” Yet those years saw the creation of more original and innovative ways of art-making than in any other comparable era. Following the lead of painting, most of those newer approaches (collage, assemblage, serigraphy, installation, performance, video, encaustic, etc.) were viewed by their creators as more that just superficial novelties: the abstract expressionists saw their technical breakthroughs as formal replacements for traditional content (theme, subject matter, point of view). Even those artists who continued to draw and paint from life generally recognized that the style of presentation had become more important than the choice of what to present. For a pop artist, a ketchup bottle and a movie star were equal subjects, provided they were presented in a manner that looked appropriate to the time and place of their representation.

So painting entered the twenty-first century offering an unprecedented range of material choices. Such variety, however, does not equal complete freedom; after all, if the look of the work contributes materially to its content—indeed may BE its content—then that look has to be appropriate to the work’s purpose. Every art student learns to capture the superficial style of cubism—never mind that her work may not share the reasons why cubist art looked the way it did. Works making arbitrary approaches may have decorative virtue, but they clearly would not contribute anything original and legitimate to art. They would not, to use a phrase popularized by the contemporary art movement, “be part of the discourse.”

This history is necessary prelude to an experience that has become common in the gallery. On scanning a room full of art, it’s often the case that new works recall otherwise unconnected ones. Not that they are copies, or even influenced by the earlier work, but it seems as though a look from another time and place has percolated into them, creating a kind of hybrid. The result can be very exciting, as was the case last week, when I came across the paintings of Michael Kessler at MAR Gallery in Park City. Kessler was born in Pennsylvania in 1954, but has lived and worked in New Mexico for some time, so he may be thought a local artist. And although his work initially appears absolutely abstract, closer study reveals it to be rooted in nature —specifically in the emergence from plant architecture of its characteristic surface textures and forms. Finding an image that delivers such a powerful, purely aesthetic rush—the pleasure of rich color and strong line, working together to create a complex-but-unified experience within the frame—and discovering on further examination that it evokes and imports inferences about the world into which it emerges, is the kind of discovery one expects to make in the museum, among the old masters, not something today’s art often delivers.



A few further observations are worth making. As is generally true since the departure of the abstract expressionist “giants,” Kessler’s works run from small to middle size. Their surfaces are hard and glass-like, qualities that go well with their frequent suggestion of stained glass windows. They call to mind European post-WW2 stained glass, with its strong graphic quality: lead lines used to draw freely over an expansive background of colored geometry that is characterized by hand-made textures. In addition to printmaking, the glassy surface encourages a feeling of peering into a shallow space full of scratched, raked, or sprinkled patterns. Lines, varying in weight but usually accompanied by shadows or auras (as if backlit) wind and weave before these grounds, sometimes freely and at other times seeming to be contained in tubes or passageways that crisscross the panel. In addition to botanical details, topological impressions often suggest charts and maps.

It would be sufficient for many in the audience that these are beautiful, captivating, and hypnotic paintings that the eye will never exhaust. They will continue to reward careful and even casual study for as long as they are seen. But for those who want to find another truth—one that can be translated into words—there are metaphors to be found in their resemblance to so many natural events. Whether it’s the starry sky, or bubbles rising in a clear vessel, or the overlap of a texture and a line producing a recognizable object like a leaf or branch, a visual argument is being made in these images. The miracle of the language you are reading is that from a large-but-finite number of words and the rules for combining them, infinite variation is possible, and anything can be said. Michael Kessler demonstrates that from a similarly large-but-limited number of colors and two-dimensional shapes, a three-dimensional world of infinite possibility arises.

Sometimes I think I’m getting tired of art, but I could watch this happen all day, and for the rest of my life.

Michael Kessler

VIEW GALLERY


Michael Kessler's exhibit of new works, Unbroken Equivalents, opens at Park City's Gallery MAR March 15 with a reception at 6pm and the show continues through March 31. Gallery MAR is located at 436 Main Street and they are open daily from 10am to 9pm.



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Opened in Maui at Paia Contemporary 03/02/13

Last evening (03/02/13) we opened in Maui at Paia Contemporary.




Paia Contemporary is a wonderful warm lovely gallery in the old hippy town of Paia here on Maui and the juxtaposition couldn't be more effective.




Here on the island of Maui the whales are calving and the waters are full of them. We sit with the binocs all day just watching them flop about from our bedroom loft by the sea.












Here are a few works that are in the exhibition:





Here are a few installation shots of the exhibition:




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Location:Paia Contemporary, Paia, Maui, Hawaii