Kevin Greeland is a cross disciplinary artist and art educator who splits his time between Southern California and upstate New York. Greelands artwork includes painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance art. Kevin Greeland received a Master of Fine Arts from Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN and a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA.
Greelands artwork, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, centers in some way around the ritual of arrangement; the arrangement of the object, the thing and the subject (and their relationships) and thus the patterns we see and create from them. And at the same time exploring the physical limits of the materials he is working with. He believes there are so many points of inspiration; each neuron firing contributes to the multitude of ideas that flood forth all at once, the trick, he believes, is slowing down a little to examine them.
Then there are the external influences; Greeland is a strong proponent of education both formal and otherwise, he did his MFA work at a small private college. Kevin credits 3 professors with being those points of inspiration one was Nona Bolin for an in-depth discourse on aesthetic and philosophical issues within the arts, Tom Lee for expanding his ideas on what sculpture could be and turning him onto contemporary artist like Huma Bhabha and Zhang Huan. Then there was Fred Burton who encouraged him to pursue abstraction in his own work and introduced him to the work of many British Abstract painters. Because of these instructor and other artists and writers along the way, Kevin felt his time spent studying was valuable; while his core sensibilities remained the same, the professors as points of inspiration influenced the articulation of those ideas.
The way he approaches sculpture is a little different than the way he approach painting, but in both cases there is a ritual to entering the studio and how to start the day creating. With sculpture it usually centers around an object, the object (the thing) sparks an inner dialogue and then the exploration starts of both materials and the object, which begins to inform each other and the idea/the expression grows simultaneously until it becomes the artwork.
For Kevin painting is a little more complex and murky, an idea of sorts occurs usually about some pattern or object and/or a ritual of behavior. First he starts moving paint and materials around the surface, often those kernels of a beginning will change a number of times until the first idea is but a layer under other layers - the layering becomes a ritual in of itself. When Kevin began to paint he was interested in Pop culture, magazines, films and comics, and artists like Keith Haring, Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Stewart Hitch, Elizabeth Murray and Roy Lichtenstein and may others. All these points of interest roll around in the creative mind along with Nona Bolin’s philosophers and Fred Burton’s British Abstract painters while he's painting and it remains to be seen how all of this shows up in the finished work, but I paint until I feel the ritual is complete, the work finished.
Greeland teaches a variety of classes in acrylic painting, and mixed media approaches to painting and sculpture. Kevin is the Education Coordinator for Golden Artist Colors, Inc., and directs the global education program efforts for the Working Artist Program and the Golden Artist Educator Program. He offers a wide selection of classes, workshops, and a professional lecture and demonstration series for Golden Artist Colors, Inc. He has taught art at Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN and Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN where he was the Assistant Director of the Sarratt Studio Arts Program. Greeland has taught art in public schools in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee including various museum education programs and art centers throughout the United States, China, and Morocco.
He has been recognized as an outstanding art educator receiving a Teacher of the Year Award from Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County Public Schools, Nashville, TN (2002-2003 School Year.) Greeland is a recipient of a Hohenberg European Travel Fellowship in 2006, he also participated in the residency program Art in Amsterdam at Wackers Art Academy in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2007.