Kent Dorn

During the aughts and into the teens, Kent Dorn honed a distinctly tactile painting style to render narrative scenes inspired by nineteenth-century American landscape painting, 70s and 80s horror films, Southern Gothic fiction, and hippie culture. These imagined, metaphorical spaces evolved into a personal interpretation of the sublime, evoked through idyllic wooded worlds, sometimes populated by wanderers searching for a revelatory experience or by those who may have taken a wrong turn. Dorn's response to the natural world takes cues from artists such as visionary watercolorist Charles Burchfield, German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, and self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum.

Dorn's large-scale graphite drawings initially evolved from studies for his paintings but now consume his studio practice. "I create drawings that often blur the lines of dream/reality, image/materiality, and creation/destruction." These intricately layered works, drawn in graphite on countless sections of tracing paper, allow built-in flexibility: Dorn layers detailed sections atop others over time, adhering them in place with archival tape. The finished works visually kaleidoscope into auric circles or mirrored compositions that further dislocate the natural into the realm of the psychedelic or imagined. Recent pictures feature provisional structures, debris, and signs of reuse and repair–the image and means echoing the artist's technique and range.