Lot # 20
Adam Kemp Grand Forks, North Dakota Lincoln Park, 2007
Adam Kemp is donating half of the proceeds of this sale to the Museum of Art
Acrylic, oil hardwood floor with customized wood frame 32 x 99.5 inches Range: $1,000 - 1,200
Adam Kemp, Grand Fork’s unofficial Artist in Residence, was born in 1962 and grew up forty miles northeast of London in the Essex countryside. From age fourteen through nineteen, Adam sketched with watercolors because I could take them anywhere. At about sixteen, I noticed there were a lot of things that could be painted on—and I did. He graduated from Newcastle upon Tyne with a BFA in 1986 but not before studying
Lot #21
for a year at a wood restoration school in Florence, Italy, and
Cheryl Olson
working with a Newcastle blacksmith for six months.
Drake, North Dakota Untitled
While in college he realized he was a failed watercolor painter.
Watercolor on paper
I put too much paint on so I would have to give my pictures a
4.25 x 7 inches, 2006
bath in the tub. Finally the Department of Painting asked him to
Range: $150 - 200
leave just as the Department of Sculpture accepted him. The Sculpture Department was grounded in the tradition of the British Modern School—Sir Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, and most importantly, Barbara Hepworth, whom his parents had taken him to visit when he was a child. Her studio in Cornwall “looked like my bedroom so I figured there was hope.”
Cheryl Olson: I was a farmer's daughter, born and raised in North Dakota. I've lived in the state most of my life. I married a farmer and became a farmer's wife. Living so close to the land, I developed a deep appreciation for the wild and wide-open
Kemp earned an MFA degree from the University of North
landscape of the prairie.
Dakota where he learned to cast bronze in the new foundry. In
balance and design in my paintings, using small detail with
addition to paintings and sculpture, Kemp’s work includes a
obscure impressions, hopefully leaving some of the landscape to
commissioned wall mosaic at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo
the interpretation of the viewer. I like to play with the vivid and ob-
(summer 2003). Kemp continues to teach popular sessions in
scure colors that our late night and early morning sun paints in the
the Museum’s Summer Art Camp and to run the You Are Here
North Dakota sky.
gallery in downtown Grand Forks, of which he is half-owner.
outside, and I hope you can experience it through my paintings.
I've tried to duplicate that natural
It is a feeling I have every day I look