Los Angeles Alternative

Artist Kevin Rolly’s chiaroscuro oilgraphs let the human spirit shine.
by Lucinda Michele Knapp

“The first picture I ever remember shooting was when I was in love with this older woman…she was 11. I was 8.”

Kevin Rolly, an artist and photographer who makes his home in downtown’s Brewery Art Colony, leans back in his patio chair outside the huge loft space he shares with several others. “We were all on vacation together, and she had just come out of the ocean. She wrapped herself in a towel, and she just stood there, really pensive. It was this perfect, honest, vulnerable moment. My dad just bought this camera, and so I grabbed it and ran up to her without really thinking…but it was my only way to connect with this beautiful mystery there, and the amazing thing that happened was she let me take it. She just kind of held it, and there was this little moment of trust. And on some level I guess I’ve been taking the same picture ever since.”

But in 1994, a discovery  helped Rolly forever transcend the realm of conventional photography.  “I was looking for something that had sort of an emergent quality to it, like light coming out of the dark. I couldn’t find it just with lighting, and I couldn’t find it in the darkroom, and I realized…it had to be an image of light coming out of something actually, physically dark. I thought about those scratch drawings you did as a kid, with the colored paper and the crayon over it, and I thought, really, this should work with a photo.”

He took a photo, covered it with black oil paint, and started rubbing it out. The light in the photo seemed to streak out through the openings in the paint, a luminosity peeling back the darkness. It was perfect.

Rolly’s cutoffs are streaked and splashed with paint, a bandanna is wrapped around his head, and his faded black shirt is pushed up onto his shoulders. His green eyes reflect to the color of the ivy coiling down the brick building behind him, and he looks every bit the prolific artist. It’s refreshing to see someone doggedly following their passion, and succeeding. His oilography—the process and product of combining painting and photography—has grown since ’94 to take up the majority of his time, as fashion and commercial photography has receded into the background.

Recently, a new layer has been added in the form of performance. During a lecture about his process, he was asked if he’d demonstrate it to the class. “I thought, ‘What, in front of you?’ But I figured, why not? The worst that could happen is I do a piece that doesn’t work. It forced me to sort of…do something I hadn’t done before, which is really scary.” Rolly prepped a photograph with oil paint. “All they saw when I came in was a big black canvas. And I told them, ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen.’” He lit some candles, started playing some music, and began to uncover it. “I didn’t have the time to be ponderous; I had to work quickly. When it was done I was seeing it for the first time along with them. It was a radical discovery process for me…this bold thing in which stuff happened that I didn’t have a lot of control over. It’s like trying to usher something into being, trying to get the plane to land on the deck, like a butterfly you catch. That’s what started the performances,” he explains. The pieces generated as a performance now comprise a third of his work.

“I limit my time for them,” he explains, “so by the end of the song, it’s done, and I have to sign it. The pieces have a particular quality…an energy that’s really unique. It’s something magic. And people end up buying them right off the easel, like a child you give birth to and then it’s just gone.”

Rolly’s roguish artist’s charm is balanced by a thoughtful spirituality that’s visible again and again in his art with its reverent lighting. The individuals in the photos, most of whom are friends of the artist, are portrayed with a respect that elevates the human condition to a process of spiritual growth, the progression of our ability to love one another.

The latest live events have taken place at “Live Draw,” an art show founded by gallery owner Delia Cabral, during which live models pose, artists draw and paint them, and collectors browse and buy as the art is being created. “I went back to shooting Polaroids, and doing the portraits live,” says Rolly. “I brought my 4×5 camera, which is kind of like shooting with a cow—it’s a massive piece of equipment and you have to focus it with a magnifying glass—and I started doing live work there.” At the end, after staying long past closing, Rolly had created over 20 oilgraphs.

And what about the older woman?

“The only real moment we shared was that photo. 1/125th of a second at f:11, if I remember correctly. After that summer I never saw her again… A first ephemeral muse. I guess that’s just what it was supposed to be. Even though somewhere in my brain I had always hoped she’d discover that my becoming an artist had much to do with her.  Longing and loss.  But with a touch of hope.”   LAA

Rolly’s work can be seen at www.kevissimo.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 10:44 am and is filed under Arts + Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.