Welcome to the world of Kenton Nelson. It’s America all right, but it’s always a hot afternoon and its always summer. The reds are red, the blues are blue. Shadows fall in clean crisp strokes across the world. The people are athletic and trim and classically dressed. It’s the American dream used to sell diary products: the unblemished American landscape, with its forever young and beautiful inhabitants. This quintessential and overly perfect Americana has a sadness to it though. The characters are isolated in their perfect world. Are they lonely? Are they sad?
Kenton Nelson was born in 1954, and is an LA based painter. His work has appeared on several New Yorker covers and his style has its roots in traditional American Scene painting and depression era Regionalism. During this era, painters embraced reassuring images of the heartland and rejected city life. The landscapes were widely appreciated as wholesome and calming. Nelson’s work has the same affect and each is the embodiment of classic iconography, but the picture perfect paintings bely something more serious. They make me stop in my tracks and stare.