Ken Kerslake
Encyclopedia
Fine artist Ken Kerslake (1930-2007) was, according to Dr. Tom Dewey of the University of Mississippi,"one of a handful of printmaker-educators responsible for the growth of printmaking in the southeast in the years following World War II." Kerslake's teaching career was spent at the University of Florida
in Gainesville, which honored him with the title of Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus after his retirement.
He was born in Mount Vernon, New York
. In 1958, fresh out of college, Kerslake was hired by the University of Florida to develop a printmaking program for its art department. He did that and went on to have a thirty-eight year teaching career at the University of Florida. Kerslake was a founding member of the American Print Alliance and was very active in the Southern Graphics Council, serving as that body's president from 1990 to 1992.
(1913-1980) and Roger Crossgrove (b. 1921). With the latter's encouragement, Kerslake transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1953, where he received both the Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts. There he discovered his medium when he took an intaglio printmaking course with Professor Lee Chesney, a mentor who was to become a life-long friend. Kerslake enjoyed his first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant to Chesney. Soon after receiving his master’s degree in 1958 Kerslake accepted a faculty position with the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Intaglio printmaking
was Kerslake’s primary medium, but he also produced series of prints in lithography
and vitreography
. In the final years of his life he also experimented in computer-generated imagery, creating ink jet prints that he used alongside more traditional techniques. Kerslake did not limit himself to printmaking media only; he also painted throughout his career.
paintings, according to curator Larry David Perkins. In the early 1960s Kerslake’s imagery became grotesquely figurative in prints such as “The Shape of Anxiety” of 1962 and “Anxiety Devouring Itself” of 1963, where the artist’s inspiration sprang from such works as Kafka’s
story “Metamorphosis” and Breughel’s print Large Fish Eat Small Fish.
The artist’s first foray into the medium of lithography was in the spring of 1964, when Kerslake based some lithographs on paintings that he had created in response to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. On a grant awarded by Tamarind Institute
, Kerslake spent six weeks at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis creating the prints under the tutelage of master lithographer Garo Antreasian. Kerslake’s prints "Altars of Man: Armageddon," "Altars of Man: The Glass Display Case" and "November 22" are part of this suite. His next major series, “Anatomy of the Star Spangled Man,” incorporated imagery from pop culture in five large prints created between 1967 and 1971. Once again working in the intaglio medium, Kerslake expanded his repertoire of techniques to include photo etching and embossing. He also added color to his standard etching techniques.
, a professor in photography and printmaking at the University of Florida, with awakening his interest in the use of photo processes in printmaking. In “The Magic House of the Heart's Desire” Kerslake combined images of a historic mansion located in his hometown of Mt. Vernon; twin images of his wife and children (located in rondels below the central image) and an all-seeing (protective) eye that hovers above all. The imagery conveys nostalgia, familial responsibilities in the present and a desire to secure the future. The artist’s feeling for the language of longing culminates in his “Cecelia: The Artist’s Mother as a Young Woman” created in the year following his mother’s death. The print features a photo-etching of a smiling girl standing on a rocky plain as seagulls wheel overhead. According to Larry D. Perkins, former curator of collections at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida,the birds refer to the “the transcendence of the spirit, while the receding rectangles that frame the portrait may suggest the passing of time or alternate states of existence.”
In 1982 Kerslake began a series of profiles of an old man with a bald head and a Roman nose with which he confronted human mortality. The series began with monotypes, to which intaglio techniques were gradually added. Sometimes the head is superimposed against a written background in which words are only occasionally legible, later words appear as legends under the profiles that refer to the old man’s thought process or state of being.
in people’s social lives. Likening the piazza to a “large outdoor living room,” the artist enjoyed watching people gather there in the evening to discuss the day’s events over coffee and wine. Upon returning to the United States Kerslake decided that the nearest thing to the piazza’s relaxed social atmosphere could be found in his backyard patio. This insight inspired a series of paintings and prints whose subject matter, sun-struck arrangements of the patio furniture on the small square of concrete outside his house, occupied him for more than ten years. The artist wrote that the arrangements, from which the human figure was always absent) were meant to suggest that the empty chairs had been recently occupied by conversing friends, embracing lovers and the occasional lone dreamer. The works in this series also explore the abstract possibilities of the furniture’s simple lines and the criss-crossing shadows thrown by it onto the glowing pavement. Related series focused on flower bouquets and trees in bright sunlight. These, according to the artist, are continuations of his interest "in the transforming quality of light [and] the play between solid object and ephemeral shadow."
Kerslake’s travels also inspired series bases on American tourists. They are depicted walking, relaxing or studying maps. These activities take place in what the artist called "undetermined spaces": "They are in fact figures searching for a connection, a sense of place, meaning and valid experience."
In 1990 Kerslake became interested in vitreography
(editioned printmaking from glass matrices) when he was invited as an artist-in-residence to create in the technique at Littleton Studios in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Over the next ten years he visited Littleton Studios six more times to create a total of twenty-five print editions using vitreograph and digital printmaking
techniques. These prints furthered the exploration of both the patio and tourist series.
After 2000 Kerslake’s imagery drew upon photographs of ancestors to contemplate his place on the continuum of his family history.
and Todd Walker
, painters Hiram Williams and Lennie Kesl and sculptor Jack Nickelson. Uelsmann and Walker were particularly influential for Kerslake's art. The former introduced him to the artistic possibilities of photography and darkroom techniques, and the latter was a fellow researcher in photo-printmaking. Kerslake's notable students include painter John Caputo of Albany, New York; painter and photographer Robert W. Fichter
of Fort Myers, and painter and printmaker Michael Kemp of Gainesville, Florida.
, Library of Congress
, the National Gallery
, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Gallery
, New Haven, Connecticut; the High Museum of Art
, Atlanta, Georgia and The Museum of Fine Arts
, Boston, Massachusetts. His honors included a lifetime achievement award for Excellence in Printmaking Education from the Southern Graphics Council in 2004.
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
in Gainesville, which honored him with the title of Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus after his retirement.
He was born in Mount Vernon, New York
Mount Vernon, New York
Mount Vernon is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States. It lies on the border of the New York City borough of The Bronx.-Overview:...
. In 1958, fresh out of college, Kerslake was hired by the University of Florida to develop a printmaking program for its art department. He did that and went on to have a thirty-eight year teaching career at the University of Florida. Kerslake was a founding member of the American Print Alliance and was very active in the Southern Graphics Council, serving as that body's president from 1990 to 1992.
Education
Kerslake started drawing as a small child and began to consider fine art as a career in high school. His formal study of art began in 1950 at Pratt Institute in New York City, where he was encouraged by teachers Philip GustonPhilip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
(1913-1980) and Roger Crossgrove (b. 1921). With the latter's encouragement, Kerslake transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1953, where he received both the Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts. There he discovered his medium when he took an intaglio printmaking course with Professor Lee Chesney, a mentor who was to become a life-long friend. Kerslake enjoyed his first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant to Chesney. Soon after receiving his master’s degree in 1958 Kerslake accepted a faculty position with the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Intaglio printmaking
Intaglio (printmaking)
Intaglio is a family of printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface, known as the matrix or plate, and the incised line or area holds the ink. Normally, copper or zinc plates are used as a surface, and the incisions are created by etching, engraving, drypoint, aquatint or...
was Kerslake’s primary medium, but he also produced series of prints in lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
and vitreography
Vitreography
Vitreography is a fine art printmaking technique that uses a float glass matrix instead of the traditional matrices of metal, wood or stone. A print created using the technique is called a vitreograph...
. In the final years of his life he also experimented in computer-generated imagery, creating ink jet prints that he used alongside more traditional techniques. Kerslake did not limit himself to printmaking media only; he also painted throughout his career.
Early work
His earliest prints, created between the mid-1950s to the early 1960s combined different intaglio techniques on the same plate. For example, his 1955 print, “Evolvement” (edition of 20) includes etching, engraving, soft ground, aquatint and flat biting to produce an abstract black and white composition of richly textured values of grays and black. In Kerslake’s 1959 print “Witnessed Image,” abstraction begins to give way to “interpenetrating organic forms with strong sexual overtones,” in the manner of Arshile Gorky’sArshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
paintings, according to curator Larry David Perkins. In the early 1960s Kerslake’s imagery became grotesquely figurative in prints such as “The Shape of Anxiety” of 1962 and “Anxiety Devouring Itself” of 1963, where the artist’s inspiration sprang from such works as Kafka’s
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
story “Metamorphosis” and Breughel’s print Large Fish Eat Small Fish.
The artist’s first foray into the medium of lithography was in the spring of 1964, when Kerslake based some lithographs on paintings that he had created in response to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. On a grant awarded by Tamarind Institute
Tamarind Institute
Tamarind Institute is a lithography workshop created in 1970 as a division of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. It began as Tamarind Lithography Workshop, a California non-profit corporation founded by June Wayne on Tamarind Avenue in Los Angeles in 1960...
, Kerslake spent six weeks at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis creating the prints under the tutelage of master lithographer Garo Antreasian. Kerslake’s prints "Altars of Man: Armageddon," "Altars of Man: The Glass Display Case" and "November 22" are part of this suite. His next major series, “Anatomy of the Star Spangled Man,” incorporated imagery from pop culture in five large prints created between 1967 and 1971. Once again working in the intaglio medium, Kerslake expanded his repertoire of techniques to include photo etching and embossing. He also added color to his standard etching techniques.
Mid-career
While the work of the 1950s and ‘60s referred to large issues of contemporary culture and existential anxiety, Kerslake’s works of the 1970s began to take on a more personal tone. Color and the use of photomechanical reproduction also take precedence in the prints of that decade. Kerslake credited his colleague Todd WalkerTodd Walker
Todd Arthur Walker is a former Major League Baseball infielder.-College:Walker attended LSU where he led the Tigers to the 1993 national championship. He also earned the 1993 College World Series Most Outstanding Player award. In 2006, Walker was elected to the LSU Hall of Fame...
, a professor in photography and printmaking at the University of Florida, with awakening his interest in the use of photo processes in printmaking. In “The Magic House of the Heart's Desire” Kerslake combined images of a historic mansion located in his hometown of Mt. Vernon; twin images of his wife and children (located in rondels below the central image) and an all-seeing (protective) eye that hovers above all. The imagery conveys nostalgia, familial responsibilities in the present and a desire to secure the future. The artist’s feeling for the language of longing culminates in his “Cecelia: The Artist’s Mother as a Young Woman” created in the year following his mother’s death. The print features a photo-etching of a smiling girl standing on a rocky plain as seagulls wheel overhead. According to Larry D. Perkins, former curator of collections at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida,the birds refer to the “the transcendence of the spirit, while the receding rectangles that frame the portrait may suggest the passing of time or alternate states of existence.”
In 1982 Kerslake began a series of profiles of an old man with a bald head and a Roman nose with which he confronted human mortality. The series began with monotypes, to which intaglio techniques were gradually added. Sometimes the head is superimposed against a written background in which words are only occasionally legible, later words appear as legends under the profiles that refer to the old man’s thought process or state of being.
Late work
In the late 1980s Kerslake spent the summer teaching with the University of Georgia's Summer Study Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy. In the unfamiliar environment of Cortona he took in “the minutae and human relationships” of his surroundings, and was struck by the importance of the Italian piazzaPiazza
A piazza is a city square in Italy, Malta, along the Dalmatian coast and in surrounding regions. The term is roughly equivalent to the Spanish plaza...
in people’s social lives. Likening the piazza to a “large outdoor living room,” the artist enjoyed watching people gather there in the evening to discuss the day’s events over coffee and wine. Upon returning to the United States Kerslake decided that the nearest thing to the piazza’s relaxed social atmosphere could be found in his backyard patio. This insight inspired a series of paintings and prints whose subject matter, sun-struck arrangements of the patio furniture on the small square of concrete outside his house, occupied him for more than ten years. The artist wrote that the arrangements, from which the human figure was always absent) were meant to suggest that the empty chairs had been recently occupied by conversing friends, embracing lovers and the occasional lone dreamer. The works in this series also explore the abstract possibilities of the furniture’s simple lines and the criss-crossing shadows thrown by it onto the glowing pavement. Related series focused on flower bouquets and trees in bright sunlight. These, according to the artist, are continuations of his interest "in the transforming quality of light [and] the play between solid object and ephemeral shadow."
Kerslake’s travels also inspired series bases on American tourists. They are depicted walking, relaxing or studying maps. These activities take place in what the artist called "undetermined spaces": "They are in fact figures searching for a connection, a sense of place, meaning and valid experience."
In 1990 Kerslake became interested in vitreography
Vitreography
Vitreography is a fine art printmaking technique that uses a float glass matrix instead of the traditional matrices of metal, wood or stone. A print created using the technique is called a vitreograph...
(editioned printmaking from glass matrices) when he was invited as an artist-in-residence to create in the technique at Littleton Studios in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Over the next ten years he visited Littleton Studios six more times to create a total of twenty-five print editions using vitreograph and digital printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
techniques. These prints furthered the exploration of both the patio and tourist series.
After 2000 Kerslake’s imagery drew upon photographs of ancestors to contemplate his place on the continuum of his family history.
Colleagues and students
Kerslake’s colleagues at the University of Florida included photographers Jerry UelsmannJerry Uelsmann
Jerry N. Uelsmann is an American photographer.Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan. When he was in high school, his interest in photography sparked. He originally believed that using a camera could allow him to exist outside of himself, to live in a world captured through the lens...
and Todd Walker
Todd Walker
Todd Arthur Walker is a former Major League Baseball infielder.-College:Walker attended LSU where he led the Tigers to the 1993 national championship. He also earned the 1993 College World Series Most Outstanding Player award. In 2006, Walker was elected to the LSU Hall of Fame...
, painters Hiram Williams and Lennie Kesl and sculptor Jack Nickelson. Uelsmann and Walker were particularly influential for Kerslake's art. The former introduced him to the artistic possibilities of photography and darkroom techniques, and the latter was a fellow researcher in photo-printmaking. Kerslake's notable students include painter John Caputo of Albany, New York; painter and photographer Robert W. Fichter
Robert W. Fichter
Robert Witten Fichter is an American photographer.Born in Fort Myers, Florida, he attended the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he studied under Jerry Uelsmann, Ken Kerslake and Jack Nicholsen and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963...
of Fort Myers, and painter and printmaker Michael Kemp of Gainesville, Florida.
Collections
Ken Kerslake's work has been collected by numerous public institutions, including the Brooklyn MuseumBrooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
, Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
, the National Gallery
National gallery
The National Gallery is an art gallery on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom.National Gallery may also refer to:*Armenia: National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan*Australia:**National Gallery of Australia, Canberra...
, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting,...
, New Haven, Connecticut; the High Museum of Art
High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art , located in Atlanta, is the leading art museum in the Southeastern United States and one of the most-visited art museums in the world. Located on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district, the High is a division of the Woodruff Arts Center.-History:The Museum was...
, Atlanta, Georgia and The Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...
, Boston, Massachusetts. His honors included a lifetime achievement award for Excellence in Printmaking Education from the Southern Graphics Council in 2004.