Kenny Harris has made a career out of describing his environment both at home and abroad. He has traveled around the world depicting subject matter both grand and mundane. Travel is a constant pull for this artist, and he has made bodies of work focused on Central America, South America, Italy, France, Cuba, Turkey, China, as well as the US and his backyard of Venice Beach. His oil paintings define a place and mood, changing spaces and cityscapes with a character and resonance from direct observation.

For this exhibition, Harris focused on finding his voice in portraiture through different means. In this new body of work, the artist has turned his inquiry from the depiction of quiet solitary spaces to the interior worlds of his creative peers in Los Angeles. The artist’s friends are shown engaged in activities or contemplation, inviting the viewer to participate in their quiet moments. The environments play a major role in the paintings by supporting the psychological space of the sitter–sometimes the figures even merge with a background or vibrate against it.

I was approaching the portraits with experimentation in mind, exploring the genre in my own voice but without pre-determined methods. The needs of each composition demanded various technical approaches, hence the variety of paint application and scale. I attempted to create portraits that evoke the human experience through a textured surface which is at once illusion and object.