Ron Kingswood occupies a rare position in contemporary painting. Few artists have brought such meticulous and sustained empirical knowledge of animal life into so searching an engagement with modernism, and fewer still have made the two seem so mutually informing. His highly celebrated midcareer shift toward a more minimalist relationship between larger fields of color and smaller animal and landscape forms placed together provocatively has created a vastly more sophisticated and engaging genre of wildlife painting.
They serve subtly to reorient the relationships between the sublime beauty of untouched environments and the risks encroachment has posed to them from settlement and development. In their redefinition of these relationships, Kingswood’s paintings attain an order of importance that perhaps rivals even their remarkable aesthetic appeal, and it is their subtle suggestion of ecological peril that one might recognize as equally embracing and ultimately as most imperative.
In his art, exactness is resolute across wildlife anatomy and seasonal migratory habitats, yet it shares authority with an acute sensitivity to scale of habitat and the wavering line between emptiness and expansiveness. Ecology is marked in its presence here as a question of relations, the more-than-human world repeatedly exceeding the outlines of the fauna within it. A hawk keeps watch against a pearlescent sky; egrets nearly fold into cloud; snow all but envelops the creatures it surrounds. In these newest paintings, Kingswood grants naturalism a measure of the sublime, rendering animal life with complete particularity while its surrounding world assumes an ever-expanding pictorial presence, recasting customary hierarchies between figure and surrounding ground.
OPENING RECEPTION
November 13, 2026 | 5 - 7 PM
DATES
November 13, 2026 - January 9, 2027
LOCATION
LewAllen Galleries
MATERIALS
In these newest paintings, Kingswood grants naturalism a measure of the sublime, rendering animal life with complete particularity while its surrounding world assumes an ever-expanding pictorial presence.
An unseen architecture
Kingswood connects structural clarity to what he admires in traditional Japanese nature painting: a “disarrangement” in which apparently displaced elements are coordinated by an unseen architecture, so that forms dispersed across open ground attain harmonious relation through spacing, interval, and asymmetrical balance.
Camouflage and the art of noticing
Habitat takes many forms in Kingswood’s paintings. Animals settle into thickets, reeds, and branches that partly obscure them, and the surrounding world is rendered through its obstructions and occlusions, loosening naturalism from the specimen-centered habits of customary wildlife painting.
“One can paint it truthfully without replicating it.”
Ron Kingswood