Description
Whale Song by Eileen Kennedy
egg tempera on panel
18 x 24 inches
Artist Statement: During the summer of the 2020 pandemic, I became enchanted by reports of humpback whale sightings in near-shore waters of New Jersey, where I live. It was as if God sent whales to amuse us during our isolation. What could be more inspiring? Soon, I was on a whale watching boat, saw my first whales and took photos. A friend who is a wildlife photographer provided additional reference shots and I began composing on my drawing board. But what context would let me put whales and people in the same image in a way that was meaningful to me? A scene from my whale watching trip? No, too prosaic--I sought a more poetic scenario. Suddenly, the fiddle I was trying to learn during lockdown caught my eye and Whale Song was revealed.
Bio: Except for a brief flirtation with abstraction in her early 20s, Eileen Kennedy has immersed herself in creating figurative, narrative paintings and drawings. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and later continued her studies at the Art Students League.
During the 80s and 90s she exhibited at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces throughout the mid-Atlantic region. In the mid-90s she signed with the Cooper Gallery in Jersey City, in solo and group exhibitions until the gallery closed in 2000. In 1995, she was awarded an Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her exhibitions of life-scale oil paintings and colored pencil drawings were reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Newark Star Ledger, Asbury Park Press, The New York Times and other publications.
In 2008, the artist took some time out from exhibiting to explore new media and techniques. By 2010 she transitioned from oil on canvas to egg tempera on panel. In 2014 she had a two-person show at the Art Alliance of Monmouth County. A show of egg tempera paintings, silver point drawings and watercolors soon followed at Red Bank’s Oyster Point Hotel in 2015. In 2019, 8 of her paintings were included in Nature and Narrative at the Attleboro Fine Arts Museum in Massachusetts, along with 7 other tempera painters from around the country. Since then, she has exhibited at The Painting Center, Salmagundi Club, Blue Mountain Gallery, First Street Gallery, Prince Street Gallery, and Dacia Gallery in New York City. In 2022 she was awarded another Artist Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the arts and two of her paintings were selected for the Lunar Codex, a project that sent images of art from earth to the moon.
www.eileen-kennedy.com @eileenkennedyartist
$4,000 *
Price subject to sales tax.
