Kerry Dyke

Perth Amboy Artist Listing

Kerry Dyke (Illustration & Painting)

Artist bio:

Kerry Dyke is a children's and storytelling/character focused illustrator, as well as a painting and painting-installation focused fine-artist,. She graduated with her BFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and resides in her family's four-generation-deep hometown in NJ. She has worked and shown in the surrounding central NJ and NYC area since 2015.

Artist statement (for painting):

In the overlap between memory and direct experience, I paint half-imagined landscapes: bridges between mindspace and living-space. The natural world—the so-called “exterior” world—acts as both my subject and my palette. I approach the land with a desire to pick apart not its true appearance, but its demeanor and essence—the elements that make it not too different from humanity.

Excited, considered brushwork meets boiled-down, moody color to aid these aims, but sweeping composition and carefully-selected abstracted moments bear their backbone. Most importantly, though, I construct images from fragmented recollections. The outdoors have always had a looming presence in my life: inextricably intertwined with learning and play and exuberant joy, but also made of the mettle of dreams, of destruction, and, finally, of coming-home. 
  

So I’ve come to perceive the land and the human person as two mouths of the same river. In depicting the personhood within the landscape, my art chances to travel back upstream—to hint at the river’s source, the unification, the life that is behind and within nature, but also behind and within us people. It proffers moments of alternatingly exhilarated, poignant, or peaceful vivacity—to hint at the vivacity already within our surroundings and selves.

email: kerrymd2@gmail.com

web: kerrydykeart.com

phone: (732) 261-1155

instagram (painting): @kerrydykeart

instagram (illustration): @kerrymdraws

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