RAiR | 1972

Wayne Kimball

Possible signs of normality in Wayne Kimball would be that he arises early, exercises, showers, shaves, and no longer bothers much with his hair. He says his prayers and reads from the scriptures. He eats his oatmeal and extra fiber cheerfully nearly every day. Mows his own lawn. Is right-handed. He goes to the dermatologist twice a year for touch-ups. His more quirky attributes include the making of smallish objects for visual consumption (e.g. collages and lithographs). He does it by hand in his basement without instructions. The collages are cobbled together mostly from printed ephemera and the lithographs are hand-drawn onto and printed from Bavarian limestones and aluminum plates. He also makes little constructions using small, discarded boxes to which he adds collage elements and other found objects and chosen materials. Seldom does anybody watch as he works. The subjects are quite literal for the most part: chairs, trees, tile and hardwood floors, animal parts, draperies, birds, representations of human heads, hands, and feet. And there are spaces filled with peculiar textures. He also adds titles. There is a bit of a nod to Northern Renaissance Art and to Dada. There is much worry about getting it right. Right doesn’t always happen. Often he has to live with conspicuous errors. Sometimes he has sense enough to toss out stuff that gets overworked. Occasionally, he doesn’t throw away stuff that would have been better thrown away.

He had really good teachers and he, himself tried teaching for many years. 

Works he has made have been exhibited betimes in formal settings: 400 or so times in local, national, and in beyond-our-borders competitive shows, and in more than 60 solo exhibitions. Fortunately enough, many works have ended up in good permanent institutional art collections. Other works have simply ended up.  (2017)