Revisiting the City

Ken Voss and Urban Realism

by Neil Myers

Recently I penned a review of praise for the abstract work of Colorado artist Ken Voss. Little did I understand then that his formidable abstract paintings hid a quiet truth—that he was also a fascinatingly effective realist painter. I say “realist” only in the loosest sense, because his work is not strict in the dog like faithfulness of reproductive paintings. His brush still displays a tamed liberty, and impressionistic dance, that gives this curious aspect of his oeuvre life. It reminds the enterprising viewer of art history of how Pablo Picasso was always able to replicate realism to a high degree of accuracy, but that he was most well known for his cubist and post-modern liberal interpretations of a variety of subjects. That is to say he could hit the target, but he chose to fire away at canvases on his own terms. The realist and the expressionist existed in the same person. The seeming contradiction of style emerged as a fertile ground, from which extraordinary canvases
were born.

In light of all of this, I began exploring some of Ken Voss’ dramatically interpretive, dynamically realistic New York City paintings, as well as his large figurative work and haunting portraits. I began, at that point, to form the more liberal notion of a “complete” artist, a modern day Leonardo who could easily paint as an abstract artist, a portrait painter, a creator of fanciful, collapsing NYC acrylic landscapes, and the like. While forming this new vision of the painter, he was kind enough to forward to me three images of his NYC oil paintings. Here the liberal interpretations of large, ominous buildings had shifted easily into very accurate renderings, like the striking lights that danced off of car windows in the cityscape. In New York City # 3, we see the freehanded renderings of a Coca Cola sign above Times Square, and the various lights and electric billboards that circle it, quivering in a loose impressionistic wall of colours. For a moment I felt as if I was seeing
a modern day Camille Pissarro working in New York—but with a sharper view to light and luminosity. Stoplights hug busy streets thronged with both clear and hazy figures disappearing into the maddening crowd. The vehicles depicted in the three NYC oils were most impressive because cars are usually rendered either in dull-headed perfect accuracy or messy scribble. Voss’ cars, gliding over the NYC streets, could have been Monet or Pissarro’s Parisian carriages—transported across time and the Atlantic Ocean.

In New York City #2, Voss has most effectively communicated the crushing weight of stone and concrete that is the modern urban environment. Yellow taxis crowd the streets, moving out of a cobalt blue shadow and into a ray of light on the pavement. A landscape from which no one can escape, titanesque and crushing, envelops the viewer—yet this is, what could be seen as, quintessentially a New York envelopment. This takes into account the pivotal role that New York has meant to the American experience in general, from the colonial times, up until the horror of the destruction of the World Trade Center in the 9/11 attacks.

Following in reverse order, the painting New York City #1 exhibits the same kind of wilful consistency that might escape any lesser painter who has attacked abstract canvases as well as realistic subjects. We look down a wide NYC avenue towards the light that filters through the space between buildings—to where a large shape resembling either the Chrysler Building, or the Empire State Building, emerges. From our viewpoint our eyes glance over the dashboards of cars lining the sides of the street, moving carefully past abbreviated strokes that create apartment facades, signs, and street lamps. The modern urban environment responds well to this semblance of abbreviation. The gargantuan architecture of New York dwarfs the viewer, pushing him down to earth in a quasi-existential lowering of the senses. Man and his creations, his giant office buildings meet in a radiant moment. The eye accepts the painting without delay—this is our world as it passes the millennium, with only its
most vague memories of pastoral life fading into the hazy background, and with jungles of concrete and steel closing in at every corner.
As thankful as our eyes must have been that Ken Voss has whirled and dazzled us with his strong abstract canvases, the new realist work on which he is currently embarking only widens the panorama of the artist as a whole. We are not seeing the emergence of just one more lightweight Colorado landscapist, but an artist with a variety of styles that operate within him all at once. This adventure into realism needs no further elaboration or praise—because the urban landscape canvases of Ken Voss speak as loudly, and as clearly, as anything rendered in the spirit of Camille Pissarro’s Paris or Jean-Claude Quilici’s Provence. These unique urban creations speak for themselves, from the back of a yellow taxi, or the noisy sidewalk of a busy city street.
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