Ron Kendall :: Artist

ARTIST STATEMENT::
For Ron Kendall, the act of painting is an act of reclamation. After a five-decade odyssey at the summit of creative advertising , directing and producing, Kendall has returned to the tactile immediacy of the brush, signaling a transition from the "captured image" to the "manifested vision." Today, Kendall views his canvases as "crucial scenes in an unending film," admitting that the results are often as haunting to him as they are to the viewer. "My paintings unsettle many," he says, "but they sometimes unsettle me even more. When I finish, everything feels strangely familiar."

The work serves as a bridge between his peripatetic childhood in a military family and his current life in Ashland, Oregon. By ignoring the literal landscapes of Asia and Europe as a youth to sketch "secret realms," Kendall developed a visual shorthand for the subconscious that he now explores with the maturity of a master technician.

Kendall maintains that he never truly left the studio. His commercial success was the byproduct of a classical foundation laid at UC Davis under the tutelage of Wayne Thiebaud, William Wiley, and Roy DeForest.

In the early 1970s, Kendall’s craft was forged at UC Davis, an epicenter of the Bay Area Figurative and Funk Art movements. Under Wayne Thiebaud, he mastered a classical rigor and a "Thiebaud-esque" command of light and geometry that would later define his cinematic career. Conversely, mentors William Wiley and Roy DeForest granted him the creative license to explore the surreal, the eccentric, and the narrative puzzles of the imagination. This dual heritage—formal structure met with a permission for the strange—remains the driving force of his work today.

Kendall’s current "surreal images" are the spiritual descendants of this Davis era. He witnessed these mentors commit their entire lives to their craft—a level of devotion that he internalized, though it remained dormant for five decades as he navigated the high-stakes world of creative advertising. Kendall has been painting in his free time since college, but those moments were rare. His earlier works were meticulously planned and revised over extended periods before he considered them complete. Now, he is creating a surge of pieces that showcase a more fluid and direct approach. His art has become more spontaneous and abundant as he embraced the urge to think less and paint more. “I’m not sure where this 50 year journey is leading me, but my art feels like it has its own energy,” Kendall shared. “In my commercial projects, I was always fixated on every detail and pixel. Now, the weight of judgment has lifted- my paintings, allowing me to freely pursue the path I’ve always desired.