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Phosphorescent Swim While Boning Up On Humanity, 55 x 66 inches, oil on canvas, 2021
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To stand before Kidd’s potent pictures … is to travel backward and forward through
time. His images … are windows onto prehistory and the future… As a group, they
make you feel at home in both ages, which aren’t all that different from the strange
times in which we are living.” -David Pagel, Los Angeles Times
Artist Statement:
I start a painting or drawing as a Non-objective Abstract Expressionist, making seemingly random gestural marks to clear my mind of expectations of imagery and esthetic pleasure. The pleasure is in moving across the canvas while leaving a colored path. During this trance exercise, marks in the paint trigger imagined images that result in a painting that is surreal, expressionist and conceptual. My installation pieces come from accumulated ideas seen in daydreams while doing other things such as showering.
I moved to LA in 1999 and soon began swimming regularly in the ocean beyond the breakers at Dockweiler Beach. Being out this deep lead to a letting go of fear and a detachment from self while being surrounded by a seemingly infinite body of water. Here I sensed that I am part of an infinitely large system of lives.These moments of dissolved identity made it clear to me how the anxiety around human identity is often used to separate people who actually have shared beliefs and lineage that go across ethnicities, religions, sexual identities and cultures. My most recent work is related to experiences like these.
A path full of pleasure leads to clarity. I walk upside down skimming my head across the
surface of the moat and arrive on the other side of the wall. Holding on to nothing, I start
by mixing paint. I make a more color-saturated version of camouflage where colors
speak at the same volume humming with indistinguishable pieces that create a mental
space where internal images are born. The mental images from this active meditation
trigger excitement, epiphany, and understanding that bring me surprising amounts of
joy. Maybe epiphanies are rare and elation fleeting but a visual version resulting from
this process understands and peels back the clothes and histories that cover the pleasure.
I see my true nature in these created scenarios where characters appreciate their existence
while anticipating more joy. Characters look through the trees at the moon in a
L.A. sky, watch birds teach them through their actions or sometimes-just gaze into an
unfinished or half destroyed part of an image in anticipation of the future.
I donʼt know what we see when we travel in someone elseʼs dreams but breaking
through the resistance to enjoyment is what I am hammering at; I love the hammer, the
chalky earth crumbling under the crawling tracks, with just the right amount of I Dream
Of Jeannie and Bewitched.
Thomas Whittaker Kidd 2018
Pilgrimage To The Process, installation/performance, art supplies, Turkish prayer rug, drywall, steel and tent