CLAUDIA KEEP

I thought I would start by asking: When did you realize you were a painter, and how did you come to be a painter?

KEVIN FORD

I wasn’t a great student growing up and I’m an only child, so I spent hours entertaining myself. My mom would give me a pencil and a sketchbook, and I would draw. I wasn’t very good at that either. So I wasn’t good at the academic stuff, and I also wasn’t especially great at the drawing stuff, but I got more enjoyment out of drawing than the academics. It was by process of elimination: I can’t do anything else and this is the only thing that is bringing me any kind of joy.

In undergrad, I had phenomenal teachers. My classmates were much more talented than me, but my teachers saw that I really loved it and worked hard at it. At the time, I didn’t know why they made a big deal out of me. My classmates were so much more talented than me. Now in retrospect, as a teacher myself, it starts to make sense. I was a sponge. They fed me more and more stuff. I loved every aspect of it. They said I should probably do this. I trusted them.

Once I had something that focused me, I became smarter with the academic stuff because I could see everything through this prism of the thing I loved. History started to make sense through art, philosophy and religion and all of it—everything civilization and humanity thinks about— was connected through mixing up this colored mud on a broken piece of glass and putting it on a surface. It’s weird. Again, I wasn’t very good at it, but I had a desire to do it and a frustration that I wasn’t great at it.

As I progressed in undergrad, things started to come together. At my school, everyone could draw. I struggled, but my struggle gave my drawings grit. It was embarrassing to show them, but everybody was psyched about them because the struggle was real. The mistakes were all there, and it gave the things a human fallibility or relateability… I don’t know? Anyway: short answer, I started taking painting seriously––maybe too seriously––in college.

Kevin Ford
Hands Touching, 2025
Acrylic on panel
24 x 15 inches

I didn’t consider that people just don’t look at things very closely. Making the things wasn’t rewarding either. I had come to the end and I didn’t know where to go, so I packed up shop. I took a hard look at that, and it was painful. I quit, and I stopped making art.

My wife, who I’ve known since high school, said, “you really love painting, maybe you should make some paintings?” It took a year of her saying that and me thinking about what my painting would look like after being away for so long. I was already pretty old to start over again. The way that I go about painting is more personally rewarding than the way I was going about approaching making sculpture. I don’t need the audience to activate the paintings. It can be fulfilling if no one sees it. It can be fulfilling with an audience too, but for me the act is enough, it doesn’t require the audience to complete it.

Everything I was doing with sculpture was about uncertainty of perception. That’s where the sprayer came in. I was making paintings in a fun way. There’s nothing painful in the process. There’s a lot of swearing when it gets too chaotic and out of control, but it’s also rewarding. I’m not using sable brushes (I must’ve missed that day in art school) but doing this loose thing with a lot of improvisation. It can go terribly wrong, but when it hits, it’s pretty good. I also work on a lot of things all at once, which dissipates the pressure on any one single painting, and I’m gentle with myself about that. I saw somebody use an industrial sprayer to make a painting in the 2010s, and I thought it was interesting. I started using it not for the look of it, but for psychological reasons.

There can sometimes be a lot of steps to making a painting. When you have time while completing the steps, you can start to think about just how absurd what you’re doing really is. That’s when you start thinking about all the people that are better at this than you. It’s at about this time that I’d usually give up, halfway through laying down a ground color. I wouldn’t even get to the start of the painting. Using the industrial sprayer makes that step take about 30 seconds and there’s not enough time to talk myself out of doing it, and my brain has to start thinking about logistical things like, I better find a flat surface to put this on before it starts to drip, by that time I’m off and running, trying to solve little existential practical problems and can’t think about the big picture stuff.

Then of course, the spray had the added benefit of supporting my ideas of provisionality, memory, and perception, but all that came later. It gives you this look of something partially there, which relates to perception, and that how something is made says something about what is being made. I got a gun, and since I’m impatient, it was quick and satisfying. Oil painting drying times, waiting for the perfect drag, letting glaze dry—didn’t go with my ADD brain. This was: I can move quickly, bring the idea and make it come together as quickly as possible. It’s not illustrating an idea—the idea and the making happen simultaneously. Rags and brushes and water and gravity interject—stuff that’s outside my control. Either it goes off the rails or it makes 2 plus 2 equal 11.

KEEP

I feel very similar. The temporality of your practice is interesting. There are artists who plan, and then there’s immediacy where the idea and painting happen all at once. You mentioned you have a practice of sketching, and you have a boat, and you sketch on the boat, and you have this apparatus for drawing on the boat—could you describe that and how it fits with the painting?

FORD

Yes. I went to Boston University for undergrad. BU has this lineage because Philip Guston taught there at the end of his life, and many of my teachers were students of his. There’s a lot of Guston there. Which means there’s a lot of philosophy along with a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff about making paintings. What I got from that is: how the thing looks is of primary importance and simultaneously of no importance at all, meaning the process and philosophy behind what you are doing and why you are doing it is what you have got to work out.
When I decided to re-engage with painting, I told myself that I wouldn’t beat myself up about it. The studio practice will work with my life, no distinction between life and art. I’ll allow my dogs to be part of my practice, I’ll let my eyes, hands and mind wander wherever they want to go. I’m not going to filter myself. I won’t talk myself out of making anything before I’ve made it.

My studio is in the basement of my house. No windows. Fine in winter, torture in summer. My paintings have this catalog-entry-ness: one thing centered on the panel. For years it has been one item presented like a specimen, like those Paul McCarthy pictures of artifacts from performances, documentarian portraits of an object. I once went to see this Tom Friedman lecture at the MCA in Chicago years ago and he showed this picture of himself standing in the white void of his studio in grad school. He had taken a few weeks to seal up all of the cracks and paint every surface white. Then, each day he’d bring in one common object from his apartment into this void he’d created. Look at it all day devoid of context and let his mind wander.

My process takes something from that, in a way. The paintings start with abstract clouds and amorphous shapes of color, failed paintings of other things, and then I do this hippy-dippy thing of putting them on shelves to stare at the shapes and by flipping them on their side or upside down, I start to see a cat or a vase or someone’s ear. I thought this was a slightly embarrassing thing, like looking at clouds and seeing stuff, or telling someone about your dreams, but my friend Sean told me about this Gombrich essay where he talks about da Vinci’s drawing process. Da Vinci would stare at a stain on the wall and draw until images emerged. That knowledge gave me a permission structure––it’s hard to argue with da Vinci.

In order to have a catalog of images to draw from while looking at shapes of color, I need a visual inventory. That comes from my drawing practice. And since I don’t want to be in a hot windowless room in the summer, and I have a little boat that I spend a lot of time on by myself (the only-child thing, again) and I draw. The motion is unpredictable. I’m not looking to render a beautiful contour. I have a pencil on the end of a 3-foot stick, and with the boat tossing and turning I’m only able to capture the broad strokes or the essentials of a form without all of the details. I’m also drinking a few beers, which gives me unearned confidence.

I bring sketchbooks out there and fill them with everyday objects, things that I’ve printed out from the internet or pictures I’ve taken from real life, things I’ve noticed, and I draw them clumsily on the boat. I fill the sketchbooks in summer and fall, and in winter I use the experience of making those drawings to inform the painting process—not translating exact drawings into paintings, but the experience of drawing something clumsily. I don’t draw and then paint. That seems like coloring to me. The BU thing was like: if you’re going to make a painting, paint. Start with paint. So that’s a complicated way of saying I get drunk on my boat and draw.

Kevin Ford
Big Easter Lillies, 2025
Acrylic on panel
40 x 25 inches

I make a lot of stuff, and I judge a lot to be failures because I’m trying to walk this line where the paintings exist on the edge of pictorial collapse: enough information to point a viewer toward something, but also leave enough room for them to complete it with their lived experience. In the show at MARCH, somebody might respond to one picture and not another. And that’s okay. It can be as simple as “I’m a dog person, I don’t care for cats”, so I like this one of a dog because I’m bringing my lived experience with and relationship to this thing and that combines with what’s depicted in the painting and produces an experience. It looks like a memory slipping away.

I myself don’t know what’s going to hit me as a viewer, let alone with someone else. What I think is a slam dunk usually is not one at all. I recognize that the skills I need in making a painting are different from the skills I need when looking and editing after: I make stuff, put it on a shelf, move things around, flip things, take stuff away, put something next to it, slip it into a frame. Maybe that activates it? I try to have the looking critically separated from the making so there’s some attempt at objectivity. If all else fails, I paint over it with something else.

KEEP

I find a lot of humor in your work next to things that are formally attractive and successful. Talk about humor. I didn’t realize you went to BU, with the legacy of Guston—forced to contend with that. He’s deathly serious but also the funniest painter. Humor is interesting to me.

FORD

The humor probably does go back to the BU Guston thing. It’s weird to watch interviews where he’s super serious, like life depends on it, and there are all these funny drawings pinned to the wall behind him. I find that dichotomy humorous. 

I’ve also got that duality. I went straight from undergrad to graduate school, so I was pretty young. I was making these monumental thick impasto oil paintings inspired by Goya with gray, umber and black, very memento mori, eight feet tall––they were kind of a lot. One would have never guessed that the 21 year old kid with the M. C. Escher T-shirt and Snoop Dogg hat on backwards was the one making these things. And I once had a critique there and the professor was like, “You’re a young guy, what are you doing? These are old man paintings”. I was angry at the time and thought he didn’t understand, but he had a point. It was incongruous with my lived experience. My lived experience and Goya’s are very different and yet I was trying to emulate being a dead painter. I was cosplaying. That deathly serious sincere thing made me out of step with the 90’s ironic detachment. It’s maybe a goth thing.

KEEP

I came up with the term “sunshine goth.”

FORD

Nice, I guess I’d be a sunshine goth. Even if I do the most frivolous thing I can think of in painting there’s this weighty dark something underneath. I can do what I think of as a bright Murakami-type thing, but in my hands there would be a grimness. It’s just my disposition, there’s something beneath the surface so I can go in that direction knowing there’s an anchor. There’s something there. I grew up in the 80s and 90s where humor was ironic, which I didn’t jive with because of my gothy earnestness. I think, I hope, my humor is reverential. You know, the whole “humor is the sincerest form of flattery” type thing. I hope that comes through. The exuberance of it all, for life and art and looking at things. It’s not open-heart surgery, we can have a little fun with it, but at the same time, it is consequential. We’re speaking about all aspects of the human experience and humor is one of those things we should not deprive ourselves of in art.

KEEP

I’m thinking of the striped pants painting—very formal. You explore genres habitually. The installation at MARCH for More is everything all at once. It rings true. It made me think about technology and attention: social media flattening hierarchies—horrific violence next to Amazon haul video next to a skit next to a meme next to nail art. Has it always been this way, or is it social media? Your show felt true to the moment, like a fracture of linear presentation.

FORD

That striped pants painting comes literally from looking at my wife’s crossed legs in her striped pants. Seeing how the lines wrap around her legs and intersect one another immediately made me think of those early Frank Stella black striped paintings, which is the height of cold, non-objective modernist abstraction and also my drawing lessons when I teach students about the concept of cross contour lines. In a sense, within the thinking and making of this single painting, it speaks to this fracture or collaging. 

Coming from the 1970s where films and art were about slowness, introspection and lack of a satisfying resolution, to jump to the gloss of the 80’s must have been jarring. Now we’re bombarded with shit all day, every day, from before we get out of bed in the morning, until we return to bed at night. There is a beginning, middle, and end in a 10 second video clip, and if there’s not people will just swipe past it, and we’re just like that happened, now swipe, swipe again, now there’s this, now there’s that. It’s all unsettling. It can’t be good. We’re not set up to fully understand the ramifications of this amount of stimulus. It’s already breaking apart.

We’re in a moment where five guys in California, and I do mean guys, the most anti-social guys ever, are deciding how society should be. I suppose it’s not that much different from royal families or empires where four or five decision makers construct the reality that we all live in. As much as I’d love to be in my basement painting seascapes, it’s even penetrated my bunker, but I can edit, for example there’s no Trump shit in the show, no war, so according to my archaeology of image making, it’s still a pretty happy place, but if I turn my head 20 degrees in any direction and I were to fix my gaze there, it’s all chaos. I let some of it in by way of my bearing or disposition and internal politics, it’s lowercase “p” political in the way that the concept of art itself and the freedom it represents is a challenge to authoritarianism.

KEEP

When I say your work and installation made me think about images and attention, it can be optimistic too. It speaks to human experience: something terrible happens and it’s a beautiful day and you see something beautiful—the incongruity is lived, though heightened by the media. It makes me think of rhizomatic thought versus arboresque thought—Deleuze and Guattari—a web of connections on the same plane. I graduated in 2015; the Internet wasn’t what it is. It presaged where we are now in a more positive way—empowering dissemination. There’s also power visually through repetition. Do you paint in series?

FORD

The flattening is a double-edged sword. During the pandemic, everybody had the same amount of real estate on screens, no hierarchy. If you made a compelling image, it sat next to something some gatekeepers told us was great. Everyone had to decide for themselves what had value for them personally. You could break through if you had something compelling to share. 

Unfortunately, humans know how to weaponize that type of freedom. Things that once had genuine engagement have now been swapped for fake amplification, propped up by technology and opportunists. I’m not trying to pretend this isn’t happening, and I think I cull from images that are served to me. I don’t make a distinction. 

As far as series, I do end up with recurring themes or subjects, but I’m working on 5 or 6 series’ all at once all at the same time all the time. I wish it was all more efficient than it actually ends up being. If I have blue paint mixed to do a bunch of clouds, I wish I could stick to it and finish them, but what actually happens is while I’m working on something, something else catches the corner of my eye and I start doing that other thing. 

I used to get all ruffled about that. “You’ve got 30 paintings underway, don’t start another one”. Now, I let it happen, I allow for it. It’s part of the process. If I force myself to stay on task and it becomes a chore, the paintings don’t have the same freshness, the feeling that the person enjoyed making it, the all-at-onceness. Even if something has taken years to develop or congeal, I wanna give the appearance that it all effortlessly arrived in a moment. When my paintings are at their best, I think they have that. 

When Giacometti was making those existential standing figures, he made them in one session. If he ran out of time and didn’t get to finish a hand or some kind of detail, he couldn’t just come back the next day and add just that hand, he would take all the clay off of the armature and build up the entire figure again all at once. The difference would be imperceptible to the viewer, but for him it would be philosophically impure. If you say you’re going to do it all at once, you have to do it all at once, not all at once, except for that last little bit. It does end up making a difference.

Kevin Ford
Amber Glass, 2025
Acrylic on panel
8 5/8 x 6 inches

Usually I have to paint two or three days in a row. On day one I fuck everything up, I usually take pictures of what I messed up and look at them before I go to bed, I think about it overnight and how to fix it the next day. Day two goes a bit better and it’s all not so bad. I teach, and my schedule is to teach on Monday and Wednesday, so I have this isolated Tuesday to work, nothing good comes on Tuesdays. I’m tortured all day Wednesday thinking about all the things I messed up, and have to fix, but I have to wait until Thursday and Friday to redo what happened on Tuesday.

KEEP

So you are using paintbrushes as well? Not knowing much about airbrushing, I’m like, “How did he do it?”

FORD

I didn’t know anything either, and I still don’t, I don’t think I’m using it “correctly”, and of course being Gen X, I didn’t ask anyone or consult YouTube to find out how to use it properly. But that’s a bonus. I don’t want to know. I think those guys on Venice Beach that make those spray paint paintings would be like, “this guy doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing”. There are all these techniques, you can use masking and get hard edges and all of that. I’m way too impatient to sit down and learn it all. I don’t want to learn it anyway. It never even occurred to me to consult anyone or look at a video. I don’t keep my guns properly. I don’t clean them. I treat them like my paint brushes. My guns are all clogged because I’m lazy about cleaning, so they do unexpected things, they spit stuff out. It’s all good. I’m always telling my students when they feel like they’ve messed up, “that’s the art part! You gotta keep that”. Preserve that. I try to follow my own advice.

KEEP

That makes sense. I never wash my brushes. There’s a sweet spot where they wear out to a certain point, and then beyond that it’s no good.

FORD

Yup. I have these crappy brushes that I’ve had forever. I don’t clean them either. They have magic in them. They’re crappy and great. I did this residency once in rural France, the town had nothing in it, we took a field trip to a hardware store in a town about an hour away and the wall painting brushes they had there were awesome. I bought a bunch and brought them back. Using them makes you feel like an artist. They look like those brushes deKooning holds up in Painters Painting (1973). You’re like, “Oh my God, I’m fucking deKooning!”

KEEP

There’s something seductive about something that really looks like a paintbrush. At some point you mentioned blurred eyesight and a painting of a press release. It felt perfect for your medium—the airbrush is soft and diffused. Your art seems to be about perception or memory. The viewer draws on their own knowledge. There’s instability—going back to tack sculpture. Is any of that resonant?

FORD

It’s all resonant. Reality is negotiated. It’s not stable. Maybe it used to be? It used to be like that saying, “Pics or it didn’t happen”, now I suppose it would be, “Is there a video?” And now we have video of just about everything, but it doesn’t make a difference. 

This is the thing about perception: people see wildly different things from the same information, clouded by their cultural and personal and tribal allegiance. Perception entails an enormous amount of subjectivity and instability. There is no objective truth. There never was, but whenever there was at least some agreed upon shared reality, we are now well past that point, so it’s all moot now anyway. The way the paintings are made highlights that. The paintings are like: “This could be a version of this thing? This could be a memory of experiencing that thing? This is my feeling of it? This could be what it feels like for me to perceive this thing?” 

It is the ultimate irony that I started making blurry paintings, and then my eyesight started going, so now I just get the general shape of things and my brain fills in the rest. Then, as a creative person you kind of make stuff out of that condition, out of these new limitations, new constraints. You think about it and how it can relate to what I’m doing in the studio. You have this personal thing happen and if you zoom out there are broader connections to be made. Years ago I made these paintings of my sketchbooks face down on my studio floor, a kind of backwards book. You’re not seeing the content. It took me a while to have the “brilliant” idea to flip them over and paint what was inside. 

Kevin Ford
More
Installation photo by Cary Whittier

And a third thing is this personal thing that we talked about earlier, about not being great at school or words. Growing up I was an undiagnosed dyslexic, so that coupled with my failing eyesight, that’s what the press release actually looks like to me. I don’t really like when you feel like you have to have a degree in art history or philosophy to enter the work. With some things that I make a bit of knowledge helps and adds some dimension, but my ultimate hope is that everyone can enjoy them for a multitude of reasons.

I’m up here in Connecticut, in the suburbs, and I have a lot of conversations that begin with, “Wow, that’s a pretty color”. And I’m happy with that. If the palette gets a person to look, awesome, if then they have thoughts and ask questions and it becomes a conversation, even better. I’m trying to hit a few targets simultaneously, so I try to have things be universally seductive, the formal stuff like color, composition and rendering, and then if people get the art historical quotation or joke, plus a personal relationship to the thing, that’s the trifecta. If that happens, they take some personal ownership, like they’ve “gotten” something, they get it, and then they’re eager to explain it to someone else. And then if I can get a chuckle and enjoyment out of making it even better, still.

More continues on view at MARCH through February 21, 2026. Please direct all inquiries to info@marchgallery.org.