Lita Kenyon

I was born in Marinette, Wisconsin in 1958. My father, Robert Kenyon, was a classically trained artist and a musician, and along with my mother was my initial introduction to art a very early age. I attended Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri and received a BFA and then attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and received an MA. My areas of discipline were painting, drawing and printmaking.

The areas of my current focus are painting and drawing/mixed media.

My work is a search for flexible forms and how to make forms with sensitivity to organically evolved shape relationships, creating moments on the surface. Nonattachment to the shapes in flux allows for future problem solving. Guided by intuition and the process of painting, scraping and repainting, constructed imagery becomes imbedded in fields of flat color or abstracted complexity.

I begin a painting without specific narrative references; the starting points for my work are as varied as the elements within them. Brushwork reveals a story of the shapes that begin as fragments and evolve within the pictorial space overall.

Within the process of restrained mark making adjacent to bold flexible forms, I’m exploring abstract painting and mixed media with a focus on constructing a dialogue about continuous decision making. On occasion, abstract references to water and our ubiquitous mountains in the Pacific Northwest inform my work. My titles emerge in the studio, are jotted down on sticky notes, not always used, but considered throughout the process.

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