Andrea Kemp | Artistic Liberty

Andrea Kemp paints reality as she sees, feels, and dreams it

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Looking through an art magazine as a young teen, Andrea Kemp found herself strongly drawn to paintings by an artist named Daniel Sprick. “That’s weird,” she thought. “This artist has the same name as the guy helping my class.” Through a gifted-and-talented program at her high school in Glenwood Springs, CO, Kemp was taking a drawing class at a local community college. The class was taught by painter Dean Bowlby, whose sweet temperament and skill at combining imagery from different sources stands out in her mind. But a quiet, unassuming fellow named Dan Sprick was there during each class, too, walking around giving the students pointers and feedback.

The next time the class met, Kemp asked Sprick if he was the same person whose work she’d admired in the magazine. He was. She went back and studied his paintings again, this time with greater appreciation. As it turned out, Sprick went on to play a major role in Kemp’s art education and early career. He assisted in that community-college drawing course she took during all four years of high school. She also spent many weekends—and thrice-weekly visits during summers—watching him paint in his studio while working on her own paintings. Later, Sprick and his wife invited her to use an extra room in their house as a studio space.

“He’s very generous,” Kemp says simply. She’s sitting in her current studio, which adjoins the foothills home she shares with her husband and two young sons in the town of Golden, a suburb west of Denver. Large windows and French doors let in good north light, which is especially helpful with still-life work. On tables near her easel sit a few still-life objects along with found items from nature, including a bird’s nest with a broken egg, poppy seedpods, and a mummified squirrel forever petrified in its last gesture of action—the artist has no idea how that happened.

Now 40, Kemp has seen her fortunate artistic beginnings bring rewards over the years in the form of gallery representation and a growing collector base, travel, awards, and the opportunity to share her talents as a drawing and painting instructor herself. Along with her own classes, which she held online during the pandemic, she has taught at the Art Students League in Denver for 14 years. This summer she took time off from some of her teaching to focus on painting, including large-scale canvases. A recent figurative piece, a female nude superimposed on a forest scene, measures 4 by 7 feet.

As a child in Glenwood Springs, Kemp could not have imagined where art would eventually carry her, but by the age of 7 she was constantly carrying around a sketchbook, pulling it out on car rides and drawing whatever caught her eye. Her mother was highly creative, played and taught piano, and often took her daughter to Denver to museums, art shows, and musical events. In high school Kemp drew, painted, and gained enormously from the community-college drawing course, and she even tried her hand at sculpting in marble (a cousin in her large Italian family ran a quarry in the mountain town of Marble, CO). “I was very driven at that point in my life, doing a lot of painting and entering my work in local art festivals,” she says.

Following high school Kemp headed to Connecticut to the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, attracted by the school’s accredited atelier-style program. She appreciated the instruction in both traditional realism and a more abstract approach, but after two years she found herself homesick for the West. She had met painter John Erickson and other artists who taught at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City—“they were great teachers,” she says—so she finished her art degree there. Returning to Glenwood Springs, she set to work getting her career off the ground.

During the time her studio was at Sprick’s house, she remembers more than once carrying paintings to her car to take to a gallery when the older artist, who kept an eye on her progress, would see her and call out, “What are you doing? That’s not finished. I would take it back into the studio.” So she did. It was an important lesson: Even when she thinks a painting is finished, it’s good to just let it sit for a while. Looking at it later with a fresh eye can tell her whether it’s actually ready or needs a little more work. “I appreciate that now,” she says. “I need to find a balance for myself, not to be too fast to put it out and not to let it sit around too long.”

For a year or so in the mid-2000s Kemp lived part-time in Santa Fe, where she studied at Andreeva Portrait Academy with acclaimed artist Anthony Ryder and served as a teaching assistant to Chinese American painter Yuqi Wang, whose instruction had a positive impact on her. At the time she was also teaching at the community college in Glenwood Springs, so she traveled between Colorado and New Mexico. When representation by a respected gallery brought her first taste of financial success, she knew how she wanted to celebrate: by visiting Italy. Her Italian ancestors had immigrated to become miners and farmers in Colorado, and she has had a lifelong interest in Italian language, culture, and art history.

On the first of several trips, and a side trip to Spain, Kemp reveled in visiting museums, absorbing art, and even knocking on doors to meet artists she admired. Amongst the Italian masters, she responded in particular to the figurative work of Caravaggio, inspired by his beautiful compositions and use of chiaroscuro. She returned to Italy some years later with her own art students and as a teaching assistant with the Rome Workshops. One of her passions to this day—along with hiking, biking, and playing soccer in a local league and with her sons—is learning Italian.

In 2007 Kemp settled in Golden to be near Denver’s art scene and her husband’s job. A few years later they opened two bike shops in Denver, which he runs. The urban setting brought various opportunities, including weekly drawing sessions with live models, which she took part in for a number of years until the pandemic put them on hold. With less access to models for figurative work, she began seeking subjects within her immediate world. Among these was a lovely plum tree in her brother’s yard. “Sometimes I try to steer away from things that have been painted a lot, but in this case I moved toward it, bringing my own vision and sensibility to it,” she says. With MY BROTHER’S PLUM TREE she addressed the visual chaos of leaves, fruit, and bits of blue sky, pulling some elements into clear focus while taking a loose, abstracted approach with the rest. The result is a strong composition evoking the warmth and promising bounty of a summer day. Another recent painting, HOW WE TALK, references earlier modes of communication. The chunky tabletop telephone and stack of letters on a shiny, red-painted dresser, a still-life arrangement she set up for her painting students, reminded her of the feeling of her father’s law office when she was a child.

Scenes around Kemp sometimes spark a painting; on her easel at the moment is a portrait of a Denver building circa 1905 whose look has morphed and layered over time. At least as often, though, ideas have their genesis in the artist’s imagination. “And then I’m left with the task of making them happen,” she says, smiling. Fortunately, the painting itself assists in its unfolding, telling her as she goes “how it wants to look.” Lately she finds herself moving in a more inventive, artistically adventurous direction, inspired by painters such as Chilean artist Guillermo Lorca, who stretches the boundaries of reality in fantastical ways.

For Kemp, this artistic liberty is an extension of her longtime attraction to paintings that feel believable yet evoke a sense of curiosity and intrigue. A piece she did with her older son as a model, for example, places him under a tree at the edge of a marsh, a fox lying curled up beside him as the boy points to the sky. The viewer is not privy to what he sees. A narrative is suggested but remains open-ended, which Kemp enjoys. With her growing technical skills allowing for more free play in imagery, her work these days is focused on “exploring my artistic voice and digging deep into what I want to communicate to the world,” she says. “I’m reflecting reality but as I see it, dream it, feel it. Like a good poem, it isn’t meant to give you the answers, it’s meant to stick with you.”

representation

Saks Galleries, Denver, CO; Edward Montgomery Fine Art, Carmel, CA; www.andreakempart.com.

This story appeared in the August/September 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.