The Quiet Compendium of Missed Opportunities

Kevin Fletcher

Kevin Fletcher is known for his brooding imagery of deserted buildings, landscapes, and anti-war themes. At first, The Quiet Compendium of Missed Opportunities appears as pure abstraction but a suggestion of a building emerges after a moment of reflection. The building has a pitched roof and is situated on triangular sidewalk. Fletcher refers to his technique as working reductively from rolled-up inks to which he applies his tools (cardboard or matboard pieces) to disturb the ink and bring up the light and expose the image. Here he used his cardboard tool to create a series of drawn shades, able to emit light but closed to the opportunities beyond.

Fletcher's artistic background is broad, with inspiration and technique stemming from his experimental, Atelier 17-trained professors to the classical, representational stylings of Old Masters. His most well-known prints are these black and white abstractions suggestive of architectural ruins and dark, wintery landscapes, achieved through reductive methods.

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.

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.

Fletcher's work is represented in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum; City of Portland, Oregon; Cleveland Museum of Art; Jundt Museum at Gonzaga University; Library of Congress; Lowe Art Museum of Syracuse University; Martin von Wagner Museum in Wurzburg, Germany; Portland Art Museum; University of Rochester; University of Wisconsin at Waukesha; the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Centrum Frans Masereel, Kasterlee, Belgium.