Featured Artist Monty Kane

Monty Kane’s figurative paintings turn cubism into a psychological and mysterious art form. See more of his intriguing work on his website.

 

 

I think everybody should name their own art movement. Mine is provisionally called Science Fiction Cubism. Something like Weird Figurative would probably be simpler and more descriptive, but doesn’t sound as cool.

 

 

In my paintings, Kafka, cubism, Kiss album covers and other visual and psychological reference points are combined in a way that is sometimes darkly funny, and sometimes just darkly dark. I’d like to occasionally be funnily funny, but I think I have to get all this other stuff out of my system first.

 

 

Cubist paintings sometimes seem to be trying to unify different angles of view in a single image, but my paintings aren’t trying to unify anything. Their subjects are breaking or broken—figures that are incompletely assembled, out of parts that were intended for something else, and don’t quite fit together.

 

 

People face away from or move away from each other, trying to escape each other, or trying to find each other but going the wrong way. This is the sort of depressing stuff you’d expect from an artist who suffers from every social anxiety known to modern science, plus a few new ones that are his own innovations.

 

 

I’m a confirmed introvert and a solitary soul, private and deeply reserved, except when writing artist statements, apparently.

 

 

I’m also a bit of a goofball, which doesn’t seem to come across in my paintings, but I’m working on it.

 

 

I live and work in my hometown in lower left Pennsylvania. I walk at night in a suburban neighborhood where I’ve seen deer, rabbits, skunks, the occasional possum, one praying mantis and some kind of lizard that declined to be identified by type.

 

 

I think trying to make art is kind of like trying to get a deer to eat out of your hand. You can sit in the forest with a lump of sugar in your palm all day long, but whether or not the deer shows up is up to the deer.

 

 

That is to say, there’s a part of the process that’s entirely out of your control. I think that’s for the best. I think it’s important to have a working method that allows accidents and subconscious weirdness to take their place in your paintings, alongside—or instead of—whatever it was you thought you intended.

 

Artist Monty Kane invites you to follow him on Instagram.

 

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