{"id":91230,"date":"2025-03-12T04:31:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T11:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=91230"},"modified":"2025-03-27T20:31:04","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T03:31:04","slug":"building-worlds-in-print-the-constructed-realities-of-wayne-and-abe-kimball-at-uccc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/building-worlds-in-print-the-constructed-realities-of-wayne-and-abe-kimball-at-uccc\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Worlds in Print: The Constructed Realities of Wayne and Abe Kimball"},"content":{"rendered":"
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installation view of “Box & Litho” at Utah Cultural Celebration Center.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Two of art\u2019s more technically challenging and aesthetically eloquent media are currently getting an unusual level of attention in local galleries. Under the influence of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, nearly every gallery in Utah is showing ceramic art sometime in March, a bounty for which we should all be grateful. Less attention is going to printmaking, but here again the quality is gratifyingly high. Two unexcelled artists, both nationally collected and exhibited, who have known and taught each other, worked side by side over decades, and yet never shown together before are now sharing a gallery for the first time. Wayne Kimball, surely the most admired lithographer in Utah, and his son, Abraham Kimball<\/a>, who began studying with his father as a child and has mastered art making at a level only possible in someone who began that early, have brought together 75 of their finest works at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center\u2019s Pilar Pobil Gallery.<\/h4>\n

In centuries past, professional art making often became a family enterprise, passing skills from father to son, but in those days expectations were different. When the sons of the Brueghels took over their fathers\u2019 business, it was largely to copy their most popular, i.e. best selling works. Not so with the three twentieth-century Wyeths: N.C., Andrew, and Jamie; nor with Wayne and Abe Kimball. For some years now, Wayne has made exquisite, jewel-like lithographs that he uses to decorate meticulously complex boxes, while his son may make prints as big as doors. And while Abe, too, is a builder, he tends towards scale models of elaborately imaginary buildings or fanciful machines that inhabit suitcases.<\/h4>\n

There\u2019s evidence here for the notion that generational differences matter in the arts. Born in the middle of World War Two, Wayne subsequently grew up in an era already dominated by the enormous canvases of Abstract Expressionism. As a member of a new generation, he rejected those in favor of small objects, and in the face of the continuing influence of Impressionism, Expressionism, and all the other fuzzy forms of Modernism, he insisting on precision drawing and fully finishing the work, rather than leaving it for viewers to complete it in their own minds. His works, often collage-like ensembles of nature or Classical statuary\u2014which later came to include the actual collages we see today\u2014largely require the viewer to provide personal meanings based on their own experience.<\/h4>\n

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