Lenny Kuehne

Member since 2019

When I was attending the Carnegie Mellon School of Fine Arts, a blockbuster exhibition of Matisse opened up at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. My drawing instructor decided to take the class on a field trip. So we loaded up into buses and were driven from Pittsburgh to our Nation's capital. We entered a series of huge exhibition halls, all filled with big bright joyous paintings. However, after a short while, the brightness of the color and the exuberance of the subject matter started to make me feel physically ill. I finally left the exhibit, knowing that I could not get back in. As I stood outside the Matisse exhibit, I spotted a gallery devoid of people. I entered, and found myself surrounded by huge simple canvases. Each contained a background color and vertical lines painted from top to bottom in various positions. The room exuded an aura of peace. The positioning of the vertical lines looked like groupings of people engaged in some sort of dialog. The artist was Barnett Newman, the group of paintings was Stations of the Cross. I left the room calm and collected, with the knowledge that one object (in this case a simple line) can represent a totally different object, that spacing of objects on a canvas carries emotional context, and that a complex subject can be presented with simple shapes and subtle colors. This experience was of far more value to me as an artist than the exhibition we had traveled so far to see.

All images ©Lenny Keuhne