Turning from Wonderment to a Concrete Comprehension of Events (Finale)

Kevin Fletcher

At a casual glance Kevin Fletcher's monotypes can appear to be photographic, with their rich blacks and silvery grays but, upon further examination, are anything but photographic. Fletcher's images are spontaneous and, after pulling the paper from the matrix, he assigns each work a title, often based on his first response and his active imagination. It is up to the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

When asked to explain his techniques in creating monotypes, Fletcher wrote: “Making monotypes allows for a fairly rapid turnover of ideas since the ink is applied to the matrix directly as in painting, but more diluted down. So, it’s somewhere in consistency of pigment between oil paint and watercolor paint, but is also oil based, so it doesn’t set-up, can be worked with rags, rollers, chips or spatulas. When I work with the ink, I may have some kind of contextual intention, but it is not typically specific. I often have less grasp of particulars and just carry an emotive condition, often driven by some news items or social observation.

My training in drawing and painting has always encouraged an indulgence of Abstract Expressionism principles of “automatic writing” and imagery that arises from the subconscious. Monotype and mark making can be liberating that way so I dig about and layer up treatments with an open vision, hoping the field, the picture plane itself, yields an opportunity, a foothold. The color prints I’ve been doing have called on different pacing to some degree, as they are tight in registration and the marks repeated, but they have aimed at a mostly hushed interiority—are approximations of my concern over events around us. I will only say that these prints are a way of my sending out some kind of well-wishing, quiet and modest thought, support for possible good. It sounds a bit naïve and soft boiled, but that’s how it is.”

In an October 13, 2007 review of Fletcher's monotypes in a San Francisco exhibition, San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Kenneth Baker made the following observations: "North Bay artist Kevin Fletcher has verged on the topical now and then in his masterly monotypes, evoking industrial architecture - and thus, industrialism - in ruins…. Contemporary graphic art does not get any better. Fletcher can stand comparison with Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), whose etchings of imaginary prison interiors they sometimes bring to mind. Fletcher has added monochrome tints to several of the new prints, enhancing their suggestions of smoky light."

Kevin Fletcher was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1956. He received his BFA in printmaking and graphic design from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1978 and, the following year, he attended Northern Illinois University for graduate study in printmaking and art history. In 1981, he earned his MFA in printmaking from Syracuse University. He taught drawing, printmaking, watercolor, history of printmaking, and western art history courses at the Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California for thirty years.