Works reveal a ‘naturalism’

“Thunderhead 81418,” 2018 by Ted Kincaid. Pigment on canvas, 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Talley Dunn Gallery.

Going on view Saturday, November 17, 2018 at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, Ted Kincaid’s first solo museum exhibition, “Even if I Lose Everything,” features a series of abstracted skyscapes through January 13, 2019.

 

As an undergraduate student, Kincaid disabled the light meter on his Polaroid camera. A longer shutter speed let him capture time in motion instead of static images. Through his artistic practice, he uses digital media both to create manufactured “photographs” by dissecting photographs of skies, using their colors, forms and shapes into pure color and form.

The fact that Kincaid’s exhibition links inner worlds to skies and clouds is no anomaly. Romantic painters’ ideal of the sublime merged fantasy and reality in the 19th century. Although these artists often painted landscapes or figures rooted in physical existence, they depicted their subject matter through the lens of personal experience. Within their works, clouds evoked ideas of divinity, emotion and transcendental experience.

“In Ted Kincaid’s studies of clouds we find intense interest not only in various scientific phenomena associated with them but also in a novel and technically challenging means by which to present them,” said Georgia Museum of Art director and curator of the exhibition William U. Eiland. “I believe his inspiration in these glorious images of clouds lies in the words of Keats, Shelley, Wilde and Blake: they are equally as poetic.” Artist Kincaid sees his work as continuing the romantic tradition through subject matter and execution. “I strive to unite digital photography and painting into a single, modern entity, Neo-Romanticism…,” he said.

Kincaid’s unique vision has earned him recognition throughout the United States as well as reviewed in Artforum, Artpaper and Art on Paper. In addition, his work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts in San Antonio and the U.S. State Department and the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters in Washington, D.C., including one of his large cyanotypes, a type of photographic image producing a white image on a cyan-blue background, is also at the Georgia Museum of Art in its Barbara and Sanford Orkin Gallery.

For more information, including hours, see www.georgiamuseum.org or call 706.542.4662.