(Ken’s Opening Night Artist Talk | Photo courtesy of Kenneth Marunowski)
Bend artist Ken Marunowski was born in 1972, the Year of the Rat, according to the Chinese Zodiac. 2020 is also the Year of the Rat, and thus far it’s been a positive and productive one for Ken, particularly with respect to the artist’s interest in Chinese culture. On the morning of Sunday, March 1, Ken and his wife Carly delivered a new body of his oil paintings and mixed-media drawings to the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland’s Pearl District and assisted in hanging the show. Immediately thereafter, the two drove back to Bend where Ken participated in the Asian New Year Festival at Bend High School, performing a modified Yang-style Tai Chi 32 Sword Form and 24 Form with the Oregon Tai Chi Wushu Performance Team. “Chinese culture is incredibly intriguing and mysterious to me,” the artist states, “and I feel very honored to show my work at Lan Su, a truly unique and tranquil place.”
Having been on view the month of March thus far, Marunowski’s show continues through April in the Scholar’s Hall at Lan Su. Five paintings adorn the Hall’s walls, two appear on easels, and 12 are housed in plastic folders in a flip-through format. In celebration of Lan Su’s 20th anniversary, Ken based each painting on motifs from the garden itself and on the five elements that comprise it: rocks, water, plants, architecture and poetry. Taking on the role of the scholar himself, a role not unfamiliar to him as a successful Ph.D. candidate at Kent State University and a former assistant professor of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Ken studied the many aspects of the Garden so that he could incorporate this information in his paintings. On location, he made drawings, took photographs, practiced calligraphy, participated in tours and a tai chi class, sipped tea while listening to traditional Chinese music in the Tea House and walked barefoot along the stone path designed to trigger various acupressure points on one’s feet. Back in Bend, Ken studied the book, Listen to the Fragrance: Literary Inscriptions of Lan Su Chinese Garden, to better understand the poetic verse inscribed throughout the Garden and its relationship to the other elements present within it.
The result of Ken’s artistic, experiential and literary studies is a body of work that the artist refers to as Layers of Meaning, a reference to one of the Garden’s three conceptual frameworks (The Framed View and Conceal and Reveal are the other two) and to his dynamic process of image accretion that didn’t stop until a sense of balance was achieved in each work. “I typically started my paintings with some basic washes of color, often muted blues and greens to signify the water element, and then added a more definitive linear structure, like rock or roof outlines, that served as an armature upon which additional elements could be interwoven,” the artist reveals. Throughout Ken’s bold, colorful paintings and as if in a dream, lanterns, lotus flowers, koi fish and poetic verse float freely among pavilions, guardian-protectors and Lake Tai rocks. Marunowski invites the viewer to contemplate the layered imagery as one would contemplate the garden itself, slowly and meditatively, allowing meanings to arise, intermingle and fade with the passing breath.
To view Ken’s art, visit his website at kennethmarunowski.com, his Facebook page at Ken Marunowski or his Instagram account @kenmarunowski