Ceramic Paintings

Essays by Andrew Berardini and John Dilg
Interview with the artist by Lauren Moya Ford

Los Angeles, 2020
10 x 11 ½ inches

Cloth 248 pages

123 full-color reproductions
ISBN: 978-0-9767630-3-1

 

With an interest in the mechanics of meaning-making and storytelling, McNamee-Tweed’s intimately-scaled ceramic paintings offer glimpses of subjects from the human to the animal to the inanimate. The vignettes often deliver moments of tender drama, with both pathos and humour, revealing fragments of a wider narrative while focusing on an instance of existential disquiet, incidental poignancy, or confounding delight.  Anchored squarely in the tradition of painting, the wall-hanging works are composed of home-mixed clay bodies and glazes, including materials dug up near his home in North Carolina, a locale known for its rich clay history. Themes in McNamee-Tweed’s most recent work include the natural world, everyday objects, the margins of civilisation, and indeed the tradition of image and object making. Some of the stoneware slabs depict ceramic vases with scenes rendered upon them, referencing the three-dimensionality most commonly associated with the medium. The artist also regularly takes the studio for a subject: walls and table-tops filled with papers, tools, and artworks in progress, the objects and images accumulating in candid conversation. 

 

Kevin McNamee-Tweed is based in Durham, North Carolina. He received a BFA from New York University and an MA and MFA from The University of Iowa.  McNamee-Tweed recently had his solo exhibition at Cob Gallery entitled Vessel in 2022.