Gerald Peters Gallery, New York is thrilled to present New Work, an exhibition of paintings by Kenton Nelson. The exhibition will be on view at Gerald Peters Gallery, 24 East 78th Street, New York from September 14 – October 14.

When the New Yorker contacted Kenton Nelson to use his fine art paintings for a number of their covers, readers of the magazine recognized the talent and immediately his career launched with commercial gallery interest.

Kenton Nelson was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He attended Long Beach State University and Otis Parsons Art Institute, and for the last 35 years has had his art studio in Pasadena, California. He has been on the faculty of the Otis Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Nelson traces his interest in painting back to his great uncle, Roberto Montenegro, renowned Mexican muralist and Modernist. The style of Nelson’s paintings has their origins in American Scene painting, Regionalism, and Works Progress Administration artists of the 1930′s.

Nelson paints figures, objects, landscape, and interior and exterior architecture bathed in light. The objective in his paintings is to idealize the ordinary with the intention of engagement, using the iconic symbols of his lifetime in a theatrical style to make leading suggestions. Nelson explains, “I am trying to make art for engagement or inspection. Suburban Modernism or Social Idealism, derived from my lifetime of environmental or cultural influences. I am painting what I know, be it man or manmade, trying to deepen or heighten reality, stylistically. I am representing the common as sublime, and inventing a shared or desired, based on my vision. If I may borrow from Mr. Copland, ‘Paintings for the Common Man’, from the common man.”