Kevin Kehoe Biography

I call myself a New American Painter because I’m exactly that, with a healthy emphasis on "new".

Three years ago I officially unplugged from a successful career as an advertising Creative Director. I decided to follow my heart and pursue my life long dream of becoming a painter. Allowing the painter inside of me to be revealed seemed long overdue. Reinventing one's self isn't easy, never dull and ever invigorating. So my painting journey has begun and I'm excited about the possibilities that the future holds. It feels as though this was the plan all along. That everything in my creative life before this was preparing me for this special purpose. As I like to say, I'm all in.

My studio is in The Old Firehouse Building in Utah's beautiful Heber Valley. With the Wasatch and Uinta mountain ranges as my backdrop, I covet the southerly light that pours into my studio windows each day. The supreme light makes it ideal for seeing colors truly, seeing them purely. Most days I don't even turn the lights on until early evening.

I attended the Art Institute of Boston and grew up wonderfully inspired by the work of masters like Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Johan Vermeer, Vincent Van Gogh and Maynard Dixon just to name a few. They are all supreme masters of light and composition.

Light, to me, is the most beautiful element in the universe because of its power to artfully transform anything it touches, anything it wraps itself around. Light and composition are paramount as I contemplate what to paint and why. Successful composition is probably more important than the brushwork itself.

Even though I'm at the beginning of what I know will be a long fulfilling journey, my early motivation can best be described as a quest to capture what is true and real, what is sincere and reverent, to capture it's realism with a soft but precise painterly quality that expresses my subject matter like an emotionally conjured image. I try to capture how a moment or place in time should be relished and remembered. Simply put, I strive to paint how something makes me feel. How I want to recall it in my heart and mind.