KEN SCHIANO

About the Artist

BIO Ken is an award winning artist living in Chestertown, Maryland. His work has been exhibited widely up and down the East Coast and has found its way into many corporate and private collections. Ken took a circuitous route in the pursuit of an artistic career. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union and while there, he could often be found hiding out in the painting studios of Wolf Kahn and Robert Gwathmey. That restlessness bore fruit in his final architectural thesis which was primarily about dissolving architectural spaces through the use of color and light effects. He has taught both art and architecture at the University of Kentucky and the Illinois Institute of Technology and is currently a partner at QA13 Architects. His skills as an artist are largely self-taught. He tends to rely heavily on architectonic principles, especially in the honest use of materials and process. His practice therefore, has an unaffected quality. He mixes his own colors and makes the pigment tools he uses, matching them to the shape and strength of his hand. While it is not a conscious intent to extend the creative practice to include the actual manufacture of the material used, it is logical that he would be interested in their genesis and these paintings integrate such knowledge. In the process he hopes his activities would also begin to suggest where the bounds between discipline and surrender lie. ARTIST QUOTE “I am an artist, which means I strip away the feints, the sleights of hand, and the personal certitude to uncover the emotional truths lurking within. As I work on a piece, I tend to discard one attempt after another until the only thing left is the essence of that truth.”

Artist's Statement

Tell all the truth but tell it slant * I’ve been studying Cezanne’s landscapes for many years. In many ways his landscapes always seem fresh, particularly those of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted over 130 times. To say he was obsessed would be an understatement, yet I am indebted. I see in his landscapes the extraordinary forces of nature and of geologic time, where his treatment of sky is as solid and opaque as the trees and rocks beneath it. My Nuovi Paesaggi series is in response to his perceptions. There is in Cezanne’s landscapes an intimation that all the elements—rocks, trees, sky, even the random traces of human activity--have been placed in a blender, then troweled back up in a scene that is primarily about color and the viscosity of paint. And one cannot escape the urgency of his attempts to describe a “sense of place” that is as unsettled as it appears immutable. I don’t wish to memorialize (in paint) where I am. Thus the Nuovi Paesaggi are an attempt to compress the shifting landscape and its basic elements, into a new and coherent form without relying on traditional models of depiction. *Emily Dickinson                                                                                                                                                                                                         Ken Schiano 2020