Oct 18

Oct 18 Artist Kurt Ankeny

Headlands House, 18x24”, oil and grease pencil on aluminum panel. 2022 - 2025

My imagination for the past 2 months has been happily ruled by David Hockney, but this past week I visited the art studio of Kurt Ankeny, who I have known since the days when he and his wife, Jen, and then baby (now 15) lived down the street from me in Lanesville.

The Kingston Gallery in Boston recently held an exhibition entitled “American Toon” of Ankeny works. I visited these paintings when they were back in the studio. They punched and deeply surprised, beautiful painting and a high key palette expressing intellectual tensions.

But Ankeny also grabs at the narrative nature of cartoons, creating epistemological works that (I write this with a smile) point directly to David Hockney’s rejection of the one-point perspective to tell a story.

*Struggling Businessmen*, 24x30”, oil grease pencil, and paint stick on aluminum panel, 2026

In his catalogue, Ankeny writes this: “To my mind, ever since the lens-image dominated the Renaissance, painting (when it tries to be narrative) has become a story suggesting medium. It portrays a story’s representative scene, or it gives us a bitty taste of a tale.”

Hockney called this “the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops—for a split second.”

Ankeny goes on to say, “To build more narrative complexity into my images, I turn to Japanese scroll painting, comics, non-Western and pre-renaissance visual storytelling traditions looking for methods…

Progress stories have blinded us. This is how I see it: the Western phenomenon of the three-act structure help up as the platonic ideal of story and photographs held up as images that are ‘true’ have blinded us to the fact that these are not at all how we actually assemble stories or our visual sense of the world.”

Hockney could not have said it better, but don’t just read the words: look at Ankeny’s paintings, where a modernist brush and palette host crisp figures and snatches of words, making completely novel but timeless messages. While you’re looking, remember the way that Chinese scroll tells a scrupulously lucid story across centuries.