Jeff Kowalski - Paintings as Records, Remembrances, and Revelations 

Welcome to my website, a portal to the paintings, and occasionally other images and photographs, that represent my efforts to transcribe my experiences into aesthetic expressions. My career has focused on the close study of visual art as an art historian, and along the way I have regularly continued to complement my scholarly writing about art with creating my own paintings, which I have periodically exhibited and sold over the years. My work tends to be representational, and often deals with recognizable places where I have spent time, have personal memories and associations, or simply have visited and whose subject matter and mood captured my attention.

     Depending on my own goals and the nature of the scene I may keep the colors, contrasts, and details closer to their natural appearance, or alter them to create formal arrangements and interrelationships that keep the work more visually effective and engaging. I have particularly loved the play between perception and exploration of form and color in the work of artists like Fairfield Porter and Wolf Kahn, although my palette often remains more restrained. I have also enjoyed looking at the paintings by Marc Dalessio, who seems to strike just the right note of light, tone, and hue.

    The results, I always hope, create a painting that evokes the immediacy of felt experience, while transmitting that experience through the freshness and lively design of the artwork itself. If I’ve been successful in creating this feeling for you, then enjoy perusing the gallery of my work. If you want to intensify that enjoyment by owning an original painting, please contact me. (jkkowalskipaintings@gmail).

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Biography

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Jeff Kowalski grew up in a house full of artists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his Grandfather established the first commercial art studio, where his mother also worked, eventually taking over and managing the business. His grandfather, mother, and father all painted. Art classes and visits to both local museums and those in other cities kept up his interest in the history of art, and desire to make his own art. He took various studio classes while obtaining is B.A. degree in Art History at Columbia University in New York City. He then completed a Ph.D. in Art History at Yale University, specializing in the study of the ancient arts of the Americas (Mesoamerica and the Andes). He has published extensively and taught a wide range of courses in that area, as well as teaching broader Introduction to Visual Arts and Art History survey courses, working first at Temple University and then at Northern Illinois University, where he was head of the Art History Division from 1996 to 2004. During the 1980s through early 2000s he painted regularly during summer visits to Maine, where he regularly showed and periodically sold his work at the gallery run by the Boothbay Regional Art Foundation in Boothbay Harbor and at the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset. During the last decade his scholarly projects precluded as much active painting (although several new works were completed each summer). Recently retired from full-time teaching, he has been painting more seriously once again, while planning to intensify his commitment over the coming years. Over the past couple of summers he has exhibited again in Boothbay Harbor, where several of his paintings have been acquired by gallery visitors.