Kevin Layshock
Artist Statement
My motivation to tell stories through visual art can be traced back to the children’s books I’d read at the library as a kid. I didn’t know it at the time, but I started to develop an appetite for worldbuilding and character stories, as well as a vivid imagination that could springboard from small ideas or observations. The next wave of motivation came from standing in museums as a teenager, seeing what centuries of history look like, and realizing I wanted to participation in a small part of that. After a detour through a modest career in design and graphic arts, I began to paint. Through technique and composition of centuries past, I hope to provide a bit of commentary on contemporary issues that hit close to home
Bio
Kevin Layshock was born in Livermore, CA, raised in Arizona with rampant Dutch culture in his home, and duly inspired by artists of a 17th-century Flemish and Dutch Golden Age. After graduating from ASU's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Kevin spent over a decade working in visual and interactive design, studying academic drawing and painting in the evenings or between freelance projects. These from-life studies, portraiture, and still life compositions have recently given way to new works which explore exhaustion and rest, playful and allegorical analysis of "living in the belly" of an insatiable capitalist society, and time itself, examined as a commodity.