Kevin Muente
Kevin Muente
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
Oil on Canvas
20 x 48 inches
Signed Verso
ID: DH1626
Artist Statement
As a landscape painter my paintings reaffirm a sense of place for the viewer. My role as an artist is to experience places in a more in depth manner and communicate those experiences to the viewer. I believe in being swept up in the moment, consciously paying attention to the noises, smells, and changes in light and temperature of a place.
My work contains an obsession with particular elements of the landscape, such as leaves, branches, ripples or stones. To me, landscape is too complex to be handled in a simple way. I feed off the energy created by the various forms of nature and think dismissing even the most minute detail of a landscape is like not adding all the ingredients to your favorite recipe.
Currently, my work focuses on the more elemental side of nature, when the landscape is in a state of flux or transformation. I work from life, from photographs and from invention to hopefully awaken the viewer’s soul. My paintings convey nature at very unique or unusual moments, thus capturing the spirit of a place. These pivotal and temporal situations secure a sense of the grand mythic qualities that mother-nature rarely reveals.
Light, place, and environment are my muses. Finding and capturing the magical unbelievability of a place and making it seem real in paint is of paramount importance. In essence, I search for the consequential when the landscape resonates with the human spirit and try to express these moments poetically.