Perry Four, a solo exhibition of paintings by Tim Kennedy, will appear at First Street Gallery from March 3 to 28, 2009. This is Mr. Kennedy’s fifth solo exhibition at First Street Gallery. The exhibit will consist of both large-scale paintings and smaller works based on the theme of the intimacy inherent and discovered within domestic life. Intimate interiors and yard landscapes peopled with figures engaged in everyday domestic activities predominate in these works. The paintings in this exhibit, all from the past three years, focus on subjects and individuals that live within the few blocks near his home in Bloomington, Indiana. The Perry Four of the show’s title is section four of Perry Township in Monroe County. It is a neighborhood of bungalows, storefront churches and traditional Midwest housing stock. Each painting hints at but doesn’t elaborate on an intimate story or event, offering a window into everyday life.

Survey townships, of which Perry Township is an example, are a standard feature of the landscape of the Midwest. They are common to states admitted to the Union after Ohio, in 1803. Townships measure in area six miles by six miles. Their roads and boundaries tend to be relentlessly straight – rigidly obeying a north, south, east, west axis.  Kennedy’s town landscapes convey some of the strangeness of the gridded pattern inherent in this inorganic matrix and its relationship with the land.

Tim Kennedy’s paintings fall solidly into the tradition of painterly American realism that prizes the particular and the empirical. They allow the viewer to examine the sharply experienced, yet ordinary event. The unspoken character at the center of the paintings is the connection of human relationships evident beneath the actual matrix of streets and property lines. The paintings celebrate life experienced through the senses and his use of oil paint favors visceral color and the undisguised presence of the artist’s hand.  This is work on a human scale that communicates direct experience with the subject and is filled with light and air. 

[Click here to see additional work by Tim Kennedy]