Kenn Kotara:
Born in Lake Charles, LA in 1960, Kenn Kotara had an early affinity for art. Especially drawn to the work of Audubon, in grade school he produced his own color studies of ducks, geese, and other wild life. The son of an oil engineer, Kotara was encouraged to put his interest in art to practical use, and majored in architecture at Louisiana Tech University. During his fourth year of study he left the architecture program. In 1990, Kotara received a BA in Graphic Design from Louisiana Tech. His first figure drawing class, which he took in 1988, proved pivotal and lead to his studying fine arts on the graduate level, receiving his MFA from the same school in 1993.

Kotara's first interest was in representational work, and during the 1980s he produced a series of landscapes in pen and ink. While his work is now abstract, Kotara still maintains a deep connection in his art to the landscape of his native Louisiana with its rivers, bayous, and lush vegetation, especially Spanish moss, which appears as a motif in a number of works. His drawings and paintings also reflect the landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Kotara lives in Asheville with his wife and son.

Kotara acknowledges a core group of painters as primary influences on his work. He saw in Cezanne a model for approaching nature with an emphasis on structure. In Matisse he found an artist who was able to re-imagine the pictorial function of both abstract space and the decorative impulse. He also feels a kinship with the modern masters Klee and Nevelson. The artist Richard Diebenkorn was inspiration both in his figurative and abstract Ocean Park series. He directly influenced Kotara?s works of the mid-1990?s using rectilinear forms. Beginning in 1999, he began using circular shapes in the on-going series of Tonal Drawings, which uses a grid as the basis for creating networks of curvilinear lines. The pastel drawings have been produced in monotone, duotone, and, tritone versions. The Short Stories series of collages combines drawings into complex interlocking compositions. Concurrent with the drawings have been a series of acrylic paintings that explore similar curvilinear motifs, employing many layers of pigment and matte medium. These have evolved into his Barbe espagnol, or Spanish moss, series on both canvas and paper.

Kotara has shown his work extensively in numerous exhibitions, including solo shows at Gallery C in Raleigh, NC, and Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta. Group exhibitions include those at the Thomas Werner Gallery in New York, the Masur Museum, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art. Kotara?s work is in numerous corporate and public collections.

Ambition - 24 x 36 inches
Contstant - 24 x 36 inches
Implication - 24 x 36 inches
Distinction - 18 x 36 inches
Debate - 30 x 60 inches
Resource - 18 x 36 inches