Collections

December Hours

December Hours - Painting
Accession #: 4395.30
Title: December Hours
Object Type: Painting
Participants:
Physical Description: Gouache on paper of blues, greys, white, and black. The vertical painting is a stack of five circles with other circles inside the larger circles. The circles are white, grey, and blue with the background a dark blue or black.
Description: Leo Kenney was born in Spokane, moving with his family in the 1930s to Seattle. In his late teens, he showed an innate and intuitive artistic talent. Most of the artists of the Northwest School were relatively mature before their work was recognized, however Leo Kenney was 19 when he had his first solo exhibition, and at 20, Dr. Richard Fuller, founder of the Seattle Art Museum, bought one of his paintings for the museum's collection. Marian Willard, Morris Graves' New York art dealer, invited Kenney to show after seeing Kenney's work in Graves' collection. Over the course of his career, Kenney's style evolved from Surrealistic figures, to circles that radiated transparent color, to jewel-toned geometrics. After experimenting with mescaline at age 37, the figures were replaced by circles with variations of a radiating inner circle which he considered to be representations of nature. Over time, he began to stack the circles in his paintings into ascending pillars that suggested the seven chakras, the centers of spiritual energy in the human body. His paintings expressed his sense of a profound beauty, an inner reality revealed as light. Kenney once expressed that he'd never seen the real world as others see it.
Category: Art
Dimensions:
Object H x W 33.75 x 17.25"
Materials/Techniques:
paper; gouache (Material)
Related Exhibits:
Credit Line: Gift of the Washington Art Consortium through gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group, 2017
Copyright:
fair use
Through the protection of Fair Use (section 107, title 17, U.S. Code), we are able to provide thumbnail images of works in our collection for which we may not hold the rights. If you are the current rights holder to a work housed in our permanent collection, we would like to make your works available for educational use. Please contact the Registrar to discuss reproduction permissions.
Through the protection of Fair Use (section 107, title 17, U.S. Code), we are able to provide thumbnail images of works in our collection for which we may not hold the rights. If you are the current rights holder to a work housed in our permanent collection, we would like to make your works available for educational use. Please contact the Registrar to discuss reproduction permissions.

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