A Cave Man to Love

That’s Kenn — the painter himself will be the first to tell you that his first name is not spelled with one “n.” Now into the years when he leans on a cane, I last spotted him during a reception in March (paintings and works on paper) at Elaine Erickson Gallery in the Marshall Building. If you were there on floor one perhaps you caught a glimpse of the master himself. Age has not subdued his nasty attitude, and I like that. One could say his flesh sags but his paintings have held up over the years.

Kwint will also be the first to tell you he’s the master.

I’ve known Kwint for three decades and I still consider him one of the best painters anywhere, though some would say he’s stuck in the past, his work is dated, etc. I ask you, is pure beauty something that waxes and wanes? Speaking of waning, in the Way Back, he did a large mixed media painting of me in the nude. It’s in the collection of Wisconsin art at Carroll College. I donated it because my grandkids didn’t like seeing grandma in the buff hanging in the living room.

Oh well, Carroll College is the better for having examples of his work.

In 1999, the then-Executive Director of the Haggerty Museum of Art, Dr. Curtis Carter, honored Kwint with a solo exhibition, titled Pure Paint. He’s exhibited in Chicago and extensively throughout this area. I would hesitate to identify him as an artist of international stature, though he’s far better than most artists who lay claim to that purported “fame.” I know any number of artists who had work in juried shows at the long-defunct gallery of Wisconsin art in the Milwaukee Art Museum. The problem is, most of the work exhibited in that small space wasn’t first class, though there were exceptions — and the work of Kenn Kwint was among those exceptions.

Did I mention he founded a small press, The Shore Review, in 1971 and published some of the early works of Joyce Carol Oates? A poet of both the drums (with a jazz ensemble) and the written word, he was outspoken in his stance about “what art is.” If you weren’t sure, he wasn’t about to waste time explaining it to the unenlightened. He was an original Beatnik.

As a lover of modernism, I’m drawn to simple, stripped-down work like the Untitled Cy Twombly at MAM. Kwint’s work is layered rather than stripped, and it is dense with paint (you name it, he uses all kinds of materials to great effect), scraped and reworked until the basic concepts are brought to the surface. I’m speaking here of his large paintings that are much about the past and resemble “marks” made by early cave dwellers.

Now and then he’d venture off into portraits, gruesome visages with eyes dripping and dribbling from skull-shapes, but I turned away from them, preferring his lyrical paintings. As gruesome as the portraits are, I don’t deny they are beautifully crafted, but god help me, I couldn’t stand the content: grim reminders of death and rot and the end of time.

You can view more of his superb output at Elaine Erickson Gallery.