BEAUTY: Painting--Kenton Nelson

I have admired Kenton Nelson's work and very graphic, unnervingly simplified neo-realist style for quite a while. Although he is from and still lives in southern California, several of his pieces evoke my childhood memories growing up in upstate New York. I suppose there is a certain kind of suburban familiarity from that time period, a certain identifiable Americana. There is, inevitably, a similarity to the work of Edward Hopper (when dealing with Americana, such an overlap must occur) but Nelson's end product is so much more sleek, rounded, and pared down to an essence than Hopper's work. I like the following pieces for the iconographic ability to evoke suburbia, summer, and the comfort that such things can represent.

He works almost exclusively in a vocabulary of the 1940s/1950s, and has created some lovely pieces. Visit his website:
http://kentonnelson.com/