The works chosen for this landscape exhibit represent one artist’s efforts at the easel on a Tuesday, any given week of his sabbatical year. Kevin Muente’s successful descriptive representations are on the spot plein aire paintings which were not additionally edited in the studio. The paintings depict common landscape, not ostentatiously landmarked but painted closely, aligned to what the eye sees with little interpretation or manipulation of the visible facts. Kevin reports that he painted through three countries, Belgium, Italy and the U.S. Stateside locales included the tristate area Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, as well as Florida and Wisconsin. One would recognize titles of some local parks. However, generally the images vary from enclosed environs to open vistas often dominated with waterways and meandering streams to various degrees and trees. Lots and lots of trees.
A partially limited palette includes 8 colors: Cadmiums: yellow light, orange and red medium, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, sometimes ochre, cobalt and thalo blue and two value adjusters: paynes grey and titanium white. Paintings are generally travel sized at 9×12 and 12×16, executed in varying time frames from 45 minutes to 4-5 hours.
Muente stated that ” from the start (he) recognized that not every effort is going to the the best, but that eventually good stuff emerges, some days not.” The project also produced a teaching tool: a self published book diagrams the project perimeters and mission along with artist’s statements and of course files of the work produced.
May 12th found Kevin painting on the banks of the Little Miami River, near Lunken Airport. The swept clean blue sky reflects clearly in the water as it wanders past sand bar and sandy banks as a light breeze rustles the spring green leaves. Contrast the bucolic warmth of this painting with “Haystack, 7 below zero”, executed in mid winter on February 17th. The snowy fields are layered deeply in vertical pictorial depth. The variety of trees and vines writhing at the edge of the yellow shaft, form a physically impassible screen that only partially obscures the rhythmic swell of distant blue hills beneath a delicate pink cloud. The lone hay roll, shrouded in snow, is the painter’s singular companion in this subzero experiment. The intense cold affecting both the paint and the painter makes any degree of accuracy a remarkable accomplishment in this writer’s opinion.
