Artist Profile: Ted Kincaid at Marty Walker Gallery
By Gaile Robinson, THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Who: Ted Kincaid, 43, showing at Marty Walker Gallery
"Seascape 920", 2008
Art: Creator of highly manipulated photographs of clouds and trees that he hangs in suites. He presents the individual photographs in interdependent grids that tend to generate sales of multiple images to single collectors.
Kincaid’s trees are dense with branches, denser than they are in life. He maximizes the trees by moving bare branches from one species to another and reusing branches that appeal to him. “I add and take away quite a bit. They are amorphous and quite similar to the clouds I’d been working with. They shield us somewhat from the heavens.”
The clouds are given the opposite treatment. By minimizing shadows that indicate where the ground might be, he reduces the atmospherics to little more than puff balls. He avoids titles, saying they confuse more than they help. He prefers a numeric designation. Cloud 8112 was the 112th cloud shot in August 2009. Tree 1105 was shot in November.
Color distortions: Both trees and clouds are printed using completely unnatural background colors. His palette tends toward tutti-frutti brights – hot pink, turquoise and bright orange – with an anomalous green-bean color thrown in. The clouds in his L.A. series stack up in thunderheads but float on seas of pale baby-blanket colors, “because you are looking at those clouds through a layer of carcinogens,” he says.
Macro to micro: He further distorts his subjects by printing them on circular fields of color so that the huge objects look like magnified images under a microscope.
"Nest 36", 2007
Yearning for the wild: Many artists are incorporating a larger sky in their works. Few dispense with the ground altogether as Kincaid does.
He’s aware that he isn’t the only one turning toward the heavens. “I noticed it as less nature became available to us. As development expands and the wilderness shrinks, there is this yearning for the wild.”
Vocation art: Kincaid is surrounded by young artists. He has been the instructor of 2-D design at Plano West Senior High School for the past four years, partly by necessity, but now more by vocation.
“I’m in a dream school, in a dream job,” he says. “I prefer it to teaching at the college level. Here, I’m more influential in the course the students take in their lives.”
See more Kincaid: His current show at Dallas’ Marty Walker Gallery is a continuation of series he began several years ago. His trees are more complex, denser with branches.
The source image trees were photographed in Dallas and Bowie, Texas, Munich and Brussels. His puff-ball clouds are always right outside his door.
Whenever the temperature soars above 95 degrees, they scuttle by overhead, on constant audition for Kincaid. “They are eternally the new subject matter,” he says.