Kemp O’Brien: Illustrator and Painter
Every blistering afternoon from June to December, I ran for 3 hours in the foothills of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
”I fell in love early with the process of mark-making and working for more satisfying images”
At the top, I would stop momentarily and let a searing weight of belonging in the backdrop of cactus, rattlesnakes, and ancient torn hills sink in.
“The making of art is often viewed as something extracurricular, but it rapidly became something more than that for me.”
These moments of transition- before I started running again or when you decide art is something you can’t do without- would sink their teeth in me and draw out venom in my blood to purify it for the act of creation. The act of beginning again. I see this act in Kemp O’Brien’s work.
“I moved from my home in Richmond, Virginia to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I took a train alone and only had what could fit in a duffle bag and a backpack.”
The hills wear you while you glide through them in New Mexico. Your clothes hemmed of sand and Yucca bushes- obsessed, Georgia O’Keeffe famously visited Santa Fe and never left.
“When I got to Albuquerque, I didn’t have much and rented a room in someone else’s home. I had neither space nor the means paint anymore.”
Simply, New Mexico is century-old cathedrals, adobe roads, and turquoise burgeoning from the rocks beneath the fauna of scavengers and survivors. Even the buildings seem patiently waiting for some unknown feeling to fill them and erode their vigas (Spanish wooden style of construction) away.
“I had never been to the desert before; moving from a place very dense with trees and water, the new city felt like another planet. I was so captivated by the raw beauty of the almost brutal simplicity that I built my illustration style to mimic that energy: clean black lines on white paper.”
More than anything I remember about New Mexico is the soundlessness of transitions. The air-tight rush of wind blurring past the window on a bus or how it feels to fall off your bike and embrace the coming crunch of impact and damage. This precision a transition impacts you with is present in the illustrated work of Kemp O’Brien
“The illustrations were a move of compromise in a way because I couldn’t stop making art. More than that though, they were a response to a new environment.”
Imprinted like the early etchings of MC Etcher, O’Brien’s lines carve out a piece of that transitional humanity and burn it to the ground to line the visage with ashes of representation.
The lines in what could be the Tarot Card when pulled means Defiance all fall onto the haloed figure below. A central sense of purpose comes from the balance in the stare; a fixture of observed stature. Contrast and texture are achieved by technical prowess and attention to what dots can do when they are placed within lines, and the ornate nature of the figure reminds the viewer of Mucha’s studies of figures. A post-contemporary Joan of Arc, she stands unamused by the flairs of expensive haircuts or perfected micro-blading, content with the attrition and guile one achieves when seeking armament against such irreprehensible change. And here is where you see it: “Part of my drive [to make art] is that I make art because I must.” O’Brien says.
I am Guided By What I Don’t Understand
Back home- in the foothills again- I have a memory of the first moment I solidified running as a part of therapy. From there I started to think less about the time I spent on the ground and turned to think about what my feet did when they were off it. What attention was I giving to the motion-bringing of the brief rests in those suspended muscles?
Light is held captive by the sundered brush strokes of sunrise coppers. A dismembering amount of time is deposited in the space catching up the figure’s suspension. They pivot and sway in the rich impossible way only the body can achieve when it is so in love with a moment but so destined to only live it once. The closest thing to perfection lives in the tension achieved through brilliant color changes around her thigh and knee: this is where the majestic and honed figure places its body of trust in to hold it from the inevitability of gravity. An invigorating inclusion is the halo’s design and constitutional mirroring to the arrow-like light drawing across her palm as if saying: this is the heart-line of the thing that does not move. This is the attention we give our bodies when suspended in motion.
“If I can be honest with my feelings and the things I’ve experienced and channel that into the pieces, hopefully someone who is experiencing similar things can see it and know that they aren’t alone.”
I Woke Trembling
Why I love running, is also why I love this sentence from Kemp’s interview, and subsequently, his art: it isn’t easy. But it is honest.
[My work involves] “influences of ritual spirituality, it is as if each subject is the summoned representation of a mental, emotional, or energetic state of being.”
Gnarled with the delicate care of detail obsession, this is a walking stick crafted from steel. It invokes many things out from me like so many small, immovable objects in memory do: It makes me think of my knees and my mortality tethered to the orbit of other parts of me coiled around something I use for balance. I see the amazing stamina it takes to create such an item only for it to be used as more than art but also literally giving you the strength to move forward.
I feel the energy of momentary brilliance timed out inpatient practiced steps of running through foothills. I feel the energy of balance; a postulation we all deeply desire, one of both creating something beautiful and full of life and letting it go as the paint dries simultaneously. I feel the energy of sunsets on the Sandia’s, a paranormal purple, binding me to the moments in my life that felt precious because they are as delicate and familiar as the linework in Kemp O’Brien’s illustrated work.
Kemp O’Brien continues his work with active Instagram handles @tkoillustration and @tkoartwork as a part of the archive. He has a residency with ImpactHub, and exciting installments to come of which are to be filled at a larger scale.
