Kevin Cobb
Bio: Kevin Cobb is a painter and digital artist, born in Baltimore, MD and based inNew York City. He is presently an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Making oil paintings, drawings, 3D models, animations, narrative text, and lenticular holograms, Kevin shares how he sees the world from every angle. His art explores perspective, art-making, illusion, and truth.
www.kevin-cobb.com
Instagram: @forprophet
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: “I rout retinomas, alas, a moniter, tour I.”
Everywhere I look I see a sea of blazing, virtually perfect circles and spheres, overlapping. Not literally. By virtually, I mean nearly, computationally, and morally.
It seems impossible for a perfect circle or sphere, with complete symmetry, to physically exist. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by these beautiful round ideas and their suggestions of infiniteness and emptiness, completeness and continuity, oneness and manyness; the reconciliation, harmony, and inclusion of all apparent opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and possibilities.
I want my artworks to evoke a sense of empathy for others’ points of view, and self-awareness of one’s own. My paintings and digital artworks often round and spherize space, and highlight my own or my subject’s starting-point of view. When I frame my view with my head and body in a painting, it comes from the impulse to truly include everything I can observe in a given moment. When working digitally, my virtual instruments enable me to step beyond natural sight, nearer perhaps, toward another form of completeness.
The work displayed at my thesis show titled What I Was Painted to Paint binds my painterly and digital forms of circularity together within a narrative circularity.
L to R: The Genome of What I Was Painted / Drawn to Paint / Draw (20" x 20", Oil on linen, 2023); What I Was Painted / Drawn to Paint / Draw (66" x 66", Oil paint, oil pastel, and colored pencil on linen, 2023); One Million Paintons (15" x 30", Oil on canvas, 2023); He Is! (39" x 39", Oil on linen, 2021)
First Year Exhibition
L to R: Lenticular Print 1 (24" x 18" x 3", Paper, ink, plastic lens, aluminum, 2022); Myrioscope (30 second loop, 3D Animation, 2022)
