Joe Kievitt sings between the lines

By Eyeswoon, on December 12th, 2010

It is always inspiring to find an artist who takes a time-worn approach and turns it into something we have never quite seen before. Joe Kievitt takes a few simple geometrical elements and repeats them until a pattern that shimmers and shines arise. Other artists who have based their work upon this approach include quilters, textile artists, pattern designers, and late modernist painters.

Kievitt creates abstract drawings using a hard-edge graphical painting style with black and colored ink on paper. Some of his abstract drawings are so meticulously drawn that, upon first glance, I thought they were digitally produced!

Although most of Kievitt’s recent work is based on simple geometrical motifs, he uses contradicting spatial elements such as flatness and illusion to suggest a disoriented context, giving the viewer a visual “buzz”. Kievitt also masterfully pulls off the difficult job of juxtaposing bright contrasting patterns and colors next to one another.

Kievitt says about his process:

For each drawing I devise a loose structure or pattern as the basis of the piece. I then construct a number of preliminary line drawings refining the scale and composition. Each time it’s redrawn it moves a little farther from the original concept in unpredictable ways. This process of creating a structure to leave things open to chance continues into the final drawing where the imagery is slowly built up by isolating areas with tape and applying washes of ink with a brush, and these areas can’t really be seen until the tape is removed. This idea of chance and the authorship of a piece is inspired by the paintings of Bernard Frize and Sol Lewitt..

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With each drawing I become increasingly interested in creating a spatial situation that falls somewhere between flattened imagery on the picture plane, as with a full-page pattern; and illusionistic or landscape space, like that of Miro or Kandinsky’s paintings. I am attempting this through the simplest devices I can think of – concepts like suspension, overlap, stepping, and veiling.

Looking closely at Kievitt’s amazing work one gets the feeling that it was created with a lot of labored intention, though somehow the overall effect ends up quite the opposite. Using rich colors and simple patterns, Joe Kievitt has created a unique style that is both lively and contemplative.