Princely endeavors
Painter Kevin Prince and the spirit of nature
by Bondo Wyszpolski
Halfway through his studies at Long Beach State, where he’d been focused on drawing and painting, Kevin Prince found himself veering towards photography. But even before graduating with his degree in photography, Prince was already drifting back into drawing and painting.
“It’s all the same, but different,” he explains. We’re sitting at his dining room table in his Walteria home where he lives with his wife and son.
Same but different. “Sometimes I have to turn my brain off and say, Okay, that would work as a photo but not as a painting.”
Having an eye for each medium can only enhance his perception for both, but Prince is much better known for what he does with his paintbrush rather than his camera, and for the last 30-plus years he’s been an integral member of the Portuguese Bend Artist Colony, seven plein-air painters who’ve depicted landscapes and seascapes throughout the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The now loosely-knit group, meaning that some of them have since left the area, also includes Dan Pinkham and his wife Vicki, Rick Humphrey, Stephen Mirich, Amy Sidrane, and Tom Redfield.
Which means also that now is the right time and place to mention that Prince and Redfield have an upcoming show, opening June 5 (reception June 14) at Los Angeles Harbor Arts (formerly The Loft) in San Pedro. Prince says he’s aiming to put 19 pieces on view, and Redfield presumably will have a comparable number.
“Thematically,” Prince says, referring to the Colony artists, “we gravitate towards landscape. I think we all to some extent work from a similar color palette.” Where differences emerge would be in the subject matter and paint application. Mirich, for example, can often be found perched upon the rocks along the shoreline, depicting waves and the attendant atmospheric effects. Whereas Prince and some of the others have a more controlled technique, Redfield’s is somewhat bolder, the paint applied rather vigorously (this alone will provide a subtle but compelling contrast when Prince and Redfield’s work are paired and seen together).
What it appears to come down to is individual character expressed by way of the brush. “If I look at Tom’s painting, that’s Tom, right?” Prince says. “If I look at Steve’s painting, that’s Steve. They’re who each of us are. It’s the personality. If you threw all seven of us out on location we’d all walk away with something different.”
Bridging the divide
One of the reasons why Kevin Prince opted for painting rather than photography was because he found painting to be more expressive. This may have had something to do with his exposure to abstract art while in college. And although he says that he paints in a style similar to that in which he began, he’s quick to add that “I always pushed the color, and my head was always looking for that.” So how did he get there? By briefly putting aside color altogether. After meeting Pinkham, who was giving a demonstration at the art store where Prince was working, Pinkham induced Prince to paint in black and white for two years. This was to gain an understanding of value and tone, paradoxically easier to grasp when color itself is left out of the equation.
After that, armed with new insight into color harmonies and coupled with his background in photography and his exposure to abstract art, what emerged was a style that’s largely representational but at the same time suggestive or evocative of the ineffable.
Not an easy task to pull off successfully, if you think about it.
“I try to create paintings ‘about’ something, rather than just ‘of’ something,” Prince says. “It’s an effort to say something beyond the image itself.” He then puts it a different way: “I can’t paint the face of God, but I can paint a bridge towards it that hopefully allows the viewer to cross that threshold.”
Perhaps there’s a pantheistic undertone to those words, where God inhabits all things, and is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1807/08 painting “The Cross in the Mountains,” in which the viewer sees the slanting rays of the sun (its source hidden behind a mountain peak) that illuminates a crucified Jesus who now serves as that bridge or intermediary between Man and God. A secular example would be the Sun, which we cannot look at, and the full Moon, which we can, the latter both a buffer and a mirror of the Sun.
That may not be exactly how Prince would describe it, but the effect, as he noted, is “to say something beyond the image itself,” and so his paintings are really asking us not only to stand in front of them and to see the recognizable (a field or a cliff or a forest of flowers), but also to infer or to sense that ineffable something else, a certain mood or resonance. For example, his night scene of a full moon rising above the Portuguese Bend cliffs is literally that and at the same time much more. Exactly what that much more is may ultimately be entirely in the hands of the viewer.
Conveying the spirit
I’ve never been out in the field with Prince while he’s painting, but I gather from our conversation that often he’s doing small-scale color sketches which he then takes back to his home studio before creating a larger and, shall we say, more refined version. He may also photograph what he’s painting while out on location to aid him in recalling precise shapes and other details (these images may be converted to black and white so as not to interfere with the color palette).
What’s of prime importance, having created a color sketch, is to capture and then convey the spirit of the piece after having brought it home and while enlarging it into a finished painting — although we may want to put quotation marks around those last two words. As Prince puts it, “They always say, of a good or bad painting, that you never finish it, you abandon it,” and there’s certainly plenty of literature to support such a remark. George Inness and Edgar Degas come to mind, and then there’s this apropos comment by J.B. Priestley about Pierre Bonnard: “He produced an immense amount of work and yet became increasingly reluctant to consider any painting finally completed, often keeping one by him for years and even going to shows of his work to add a few last touches.”
In the case of a writer, he or she can dig in the next day and revise the wording, but is Prince able to return and make changes, and what if it was a picture he was doing in a meadow or hilltop?
“Sometimes you can go back,” he replies, “if the weather’s the same — which in California there’s huge chunks (of successive days) where it’s obviously going to be the same. So, the light’s probably going to be similar over a half-hour period, and then time shifts or whatever, but you can probably get it two or three days in a row.”
However, the biggest hurdle appears to remain that of retaining the spirit of the piece while enlarging what could be a six by four inch sketch to a canvas that’s maybe four feet by three feet. Sometimes it looks good and Prince may think, All right, I’ve done it. But when the next day dawns, looking at it again, the deficiencies wake up and pop out.
“Then you get disappointed,” he says. “And then you come back: Okay, I’ve got to do this, right?”
Anyone who’s been working creatively in the arts for a long time kind of filters in the hurdles, the obstacles, the down-and-out time, and the odds of getting an outstanding result. As W. Eugene Smith said, quoted by Sam Stephenson in “The Jazz Loft Project,” “If you can go into the darkroom to print and if you can come out and have one good picture printed, that’s an evening. You’ve done something. You know, that’s a lot: to actually come out and make one good print.”
No one hits home runs every time they come up to bat. It’s always trial and error and misfire, especially if the artist is pushing himself and attempting something new or different. If it can’t be fixed, one moves on and makes another attempt.
In it from the start
Those attempts began many years ago. “I drew and painted all through high school,” Prince says, “grade school even, and then I went to El Camino, doing art.” After that, as we’ve already learned, he went on to study art and photography at Long Beach State, but what about before that? What about his earliest days?
Figuratively speaking, Prince was born just down the street, in Hawthorne. He grew up in North Torrance and attended Bishop Montgomery High School. Much later he worked as a graphic artist and retired just last year.
If you’re thinking, This fellow didn’t venture very far from the cradle you’d mostly be right. But because his wife, who worked for Toyota, when the company sat on a pretty parcel of land over on 190th and Western, opted to go with them when Toyota decamped for Texas, he ended up in Dallas for about four years.
Were there new painting opportunities? Well, apparently not.
One struggle with Texas, Prince says, is that it was either too hot or too cold. “The temperature swings were so wild that, for the time we were out there, I tried a couple of times to paint but it was hard, not only because of that, but because there’s flat, flat, and then flat.” A landscape, in other words, that never woke up.
“So, during that time in Texas,” he continues, “I turned more towards music, and I taught myself how to record at home and stuff like that,” which included writing music. “It’s mostly songs,” he replies, when asked what sort of compositions, “just because I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s listening to AM-FM radio.” He’d also grown up playing piano, taught himself guitar in high school, “and played in a lot of little bands here and there.”
Our conversation about music is not really off-topic, because all the arts are intertwined, but it eventually returns to where we started and winds up with a general but key question: Why do you paint?
“Why do I paint? I have to,” Prince replies, “because I can’t ‘not’ do it.” And if he wasn’t able to paint or make music, “I would get really frustrated and depressed.”
It’s that need to create, he adds, and about tuning in to nature when he’s outdoors and painting. “It’s nearly a spiritual experience. Being out in a landscape is an opportunity, an access point to something larger, something beyond.”
Crossing that bridge, perhaps, between what is seen and what is waiting to be discovered behind what is visible. And that’s what an artist like Kevin Prince does best.
Paintings by Kevin Prince and Tom Redfield go on view June 5 at Los Angeles Harbor Arts, 401 S. Mesa St., San Pedro. Reception, Saturday, June 14, from 5 to 8 p.m. Through July 13. PEN
