Angela

About the Work

From the Artist

On the recommendation of Hitoshi Nakazato, I applied for an artist residency. While I have a great deal of experience in intaglio printing, my experience in color lithography was very limited. I decided to make an image of my girlfriend, "Angela", sitting very upright on the couch. My work in painting and print deals almost exclusively with the human figure and the interaction between myself and the sitter and the psychology of being viewed. I arrived at Brandywine with several completed mylars. Bob Franklin and I collaborated over a series of weeks to arrive at the final print. I teach printmaking and I am the print shop manager at Penn, so it was a very different and enlightening experience for me personally to be the one putting the trust in someone else's knowledge and experience. The final result was very much to my satisfaction, and I would highly recommend to any artist the experience of collaboration at the Brandywine workshop.
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records

I always wanted to be an artist. I didn’t know what being an artist meant, but I did know that making images is what made me feel most alive and connected to the world. It still is… I work simultaneously in several different print and paint mediums. I choose each medium for its specific qualities, which dictate my process and become an active participant in the final image. In printmaking my overriding interest is in the multiple- not as a way of producing an edition, a “run” of a single image, but as a way of producing variations on a theme. These variations occur through working proofs, multiple states, varied inking, material choices, and chance.

My works, paintings, prints, and drawings deal with the figure and with questions regarding the human condition. The human condition’s basic elements, the search for life’s meaning, inevitable loneliness, desire for gratification through food or intimacy, and the omnipresent knowledge of our own mortality are all themes in my works- sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. These facts of the human experience have caused me to become obsessed with portraying the skin's meaty physicality, vulnerability, and poignantly beautiful imperfections. The corporeal material of the body finds its counterpart in a direct and purposefully unpolished mark. The people, places, and objects portrayed are primarily those I know best and interact with daily.
—Excerpted from https://briankreydatus.com/home.html, accessed 6-28-2021