Booker and Kepple: Extra Texture
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 2, 2006; Page WE63
“...The paintings of Kevin Kepple, on view at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, are similarly seductive. Unlike Booker's
work, though, Kepple's glue-and-ink-on-birch-panel abstractions utilize both hue and texture.
Working in a palette of mostly gemlike greens, reds and oranges (with a smattering of cool blue-ish whites
and white-ish blues that evoke porcelain), Kepple creates unexpected depth by laying down multiple glazelike
layers of semi-translucent color in a signature motif of coiled, undulating circles. Think of mattress springs that
have been sunk just below the surface of a pool of sunlit root beer, or pineapple juice, or algae-clogged pond,
and you'll begin to have an imperfect sense of their luminescent, liquid depths.
You may want to lick them, or break their glossy surface by dipping your fingers in. They glow.
They are not, at least compared with Booker's art, overtly content-driven. Which is not to say they're content-free.
Like the Washington Color School painters, in whose lineage Kepple is at least a grandnephew, and like the work of
Washington stalwart Robin Rose, whose studio assistant Kepple once was, this is retinal art. It's more than easy on
the eyes; it's almost promiscuous beauty.
Sure, it's about color, and surface and material. But you also get the feeling that Kepple's pictures, unlike Narcissus,
are in love with more than their own reflections. At times, they evoke place. "Little Conemaugh," "Iron City II" and "Tioga,"
particularly, suggest interpretations of the artist's native Pennsylvania. At other times, our own mortality is brought to mind,
as with the dried-blood reds of "Suture" or, at the other extreme, the bone-white pallor of "Bloodless."
It's art with a pretty face, yes, but a brain and a heart to boot.
KEVIN A. KEPPLE: NEW PAINTINGS
Through June 17 at
Addison/Ripley Fine Art,
1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW.
202-338-5180.
Open Tuesday-Saturday 11 to 6. Free.