NEW PAINTINGS

Kingston’s paintings are made through a range of gestures, smears, scratches and erasures. He lays out the compositions intuitively and allows painterly ‘incident’ to be the guide.

The surface of Kingston’s work has several layers where he builds and modifies motifs.  He draws and paints shapes without thinking of them too much in advance allowing the forms to suggest objects that never get specific.  Through a series of fits and starts he gradually layers over the initial painting and through the combined effects of overlap and palimpsest a hazy ambiguous space appears.  Kingston states, “It is what I call a ‘search and destroy’ process.  I paint intuitively, and just keep doing it until it looks like I can stop.”

Influenced by Cy Twombly, Paul Klee and also jazz music which Kingston usually has playing in his studio, he embraces history while his paintings clearly remain contemporary.  From his haphazard approach Kingston tries to coax out a harmony or balance that is abstract yet evocative; formal yet psychological.  His objective is to let his paintings unfold slowly to the viewer as it does in the making.

Robert Kingston received his BFA from California State University and MFA from the Claremont Graduate School. Kingston has exhibited at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, Riverside Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art.