“Kevin MacDonald, from American Masters”
By Edward Nygren, from American Masters: Works on Paper from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. SITES and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1986
Born in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1946, MacDonald studied art at Montgomery College, the Corcoran School of Art, and George Washington University. Trained as a painter, he began to focus on drawings after seeing an exhibition of Michael Clark’s work at the Corcoran in 1971. At first he did architectural drawings, but by 1972, he was rendering interiors. In 1974 he introduced color to his work and he has recently expanded his media to include pastel and oil.
Like so many of McDonald’s compositions, "Kitchen Still Life" is a memory image. Based on a particular kitchen from a house in West Virginia where he vacationed, the work was created sometime later. Although not a frequent subject in his oeuvre, the kitchen is typical of the commonplace environments the artist favors.
MacDonald is not interested in capturing a moment or describing a scene. His people-less compositions, tinged with an air of loneliness and melancholy, achieve a timelessness through elimination of detail, simplification of form, and manipulation of light. It is the remembrance of an experience that he seeks, not the naturalistic recreation of a specific setting. The memory and the actuality blend to form a new reality free from temporal constraints.
Bathed with a light that emanates from the room itself, the kitchen in this work glows in a dream-like vision. MacDonald presents a mythic world: no flaw mars the crisp and beautiful forms; no clutter disrupts the distilled purity of the scene; no human presence destroys its unrelieved stillness. The inner light that emerges through veils of thinly applied color both defines and dissolves the objects and space. The artist's fastidiousness and his obsessive technique, which allow for no mistake or corrections, contribute to the magic of the image.
— Edward J. Nygren