Instgram:  https://www.instagram.com/steve_kenna

Steve’s Whinfield Gallery website – https://www.whinfieldgallery.uk

Coming from a strong background in both formal architectural drawing and traditional pen and ink, pencil and charcoal work, Steve now broadens and loosens his approach covering a considerable distance between representational and more abstract modes often within a single, individual work.

Conceptually, his focus is increasingly with the ‘space between’- the ‘liminal’. These transitional spaces may be literally between drawing and painting, or around those shifting, ephemeral and ambiguous zones in a changing sky or land or seascape. But they also have powerful metaphoric and philosophical resonances. These concerns may also have their parallel in the mediums and tools Steve now favours when drawing – ‘sketching’ with black and white Gesso and liquid charcoal, creating loose gestural marks and forms carved with shapers and scrapers, seeking out a flickering and destabilizing play of light, reflections, dazzle and darkness, a sense of mass and of weightlessness, and increasingly setting luminosity against materiality.

The work is continually sanded back to reveal an unexpected richness in the surface. These strategies enable continual modifications to what might be considered a palimpsest.

Steve gained an award for best in Colour, selected by Jeannette Barnes from the Royal Drawing School, at the SGFA open in the Mall Galleries in 2024, is also an Academician of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts (SWAc) and has recently exhibited at the Royal West of England Academy.

Steve’s practice also embraces print-making techniques of copper and aluminium etching, contemporary photopolymer gravure, dynamic monotype printing and Gold Leaf/gilding works.