Ken Orton, who has painted and shown extensively in Europe, has adopted the Catskill Mountains region as his home. Sometimes it takes an outsider to recognize the beauty that may seem commonplace or unattractive to the native. In recent years, his landscape and still-life work has focused on the disused and redundant, using dilapidated rural motels, rusting old cars and tractors as his themes and more recently, rediscovering glass canning jars. This is a gritty, more worn out country, but still part of a country weekend. It is in the love, skill and extraordinary handling of light he lavishes on his, often neglected, subject matter that the viewer is forced to re-examine their vision. Though many of his architectural subjects will seem recognizable to those familiar to the area, through Orton’s eyes, they take on a new life.

Born in Birmingham, England, Ken Orton, has spent most of my adult life teaching and painting. For twenty years, he was in charge of the Joan Miro Centro de Arte, Beleares International School in Mallorca, Spain, where he taught analytical drawing, composition and color theory.

“As a teacher my aim was to develop good visual perception in my students. I believe the need to respond creatively to those perceptions is visceral. Those who enjoy the rhythms, tones and colors of our natural world, those who enjoy the lights and shadows of dappled sunlight are the ones most likely to pick up a stick and draw in the wet sand in celebration of those perceptions. My work, over the last ten years, has been a natural progression of the principles I have always advocated. Light is my theme and Americana my subject.

I am often described as a photo-realist, but my work is considerably looser and I aim to test the perimeters between photo-realism and a very loose expressionistic response to my media.

I still get enormous pleasure from watching a young person move towards one of my canvases. At that moment, when the image switches from being photographic to being very human and painterly, there is often an uttered “Wow”…I love them Wows”.

email: kenorton@kenortongallery.com