Three years ago artist Kevin Sloan was approached by Lisa M.W. Eldred, the director of exhibitions at Denver Botanic Gardens, with an offer to create a show for the new gallery they were building. Sloan was interested in the project, and the pair continued talks as the construction on the Freyer-Newman Center for Science, Art and Education progressed from its groundbreaking in May 2018. The building was complete in spring 2020, but because of the pandemic, has slowly been opening its spaces. Sloan’s exhibition was scheduled and about a year prior he began working on the site-specific paintings.
Blessed Thistle, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 66"
His artwork has always focused on nature, but with this series of paintings he used the gardens and the gallery space as inspiration. “I painted this group of works to be specifically seen together as a family of paintings. A lot of the images within the paintings are reflected from one work to another. For instance, there’s a small painting, 24 by 24 inches, of a single sunflower and a much larger one that is full of sunflowers. It’s this giant plant,” says Sloan. “This venue interested me greatly as an atypical art venue because the primary reason to go to the Denver Botanic Gardens is to see the gorgeous gardens and plant life, and I didn’t want to pretend that didn’t exist. It does exist and I wanted to echo that quality of the natural world in my work.”
Radiant Season: Paintings by Kevin Sloan will be on view March 13 to July 11 and is organized in collaboration with local gallery K Contemporary. Included will be 16 paintings ranging from smaller scale, around 18 by 18 inches, to monumental works measuring 84 inches in height. “It’s quite a spectrum in size,” acknowledges Sloan. “That was quite intentional, because I wanted to have this moment of grandeur where you take a step back to take it in. Then, with the small works, you physically move in and get up close to them.”
A View of Dawn on the Eastern Plains, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60"
This interaction is akin to what someone would do while standing in nature. It lends itself well for the gallery space, which will be open to the public with safety protocols in place. Sloan adds, “The Botanic Gardens is set up for that experience because there are wonderful things everywhere. I didn’t want my exhibition to be any different. I wanted it to have that endless quality, where every painting has something to give you. There’s something that makes you want to go around the corner and want to see what’s lurking and what else might have been created.”
The plant life focus for this exhibition is specifically species that are overlooked or humble, such as the sunflowers, thistles or prickly pear cacti. “It’s the kind of overlooked and scrappy plants that take hold where they can and they find their way. I find that profoundly noble,” says Sloan. “This show is not made about the pandemic or this period, but it was created during this time. I started noticing my interest in these iconic forms elevated to grand scale. The simple thistle, in my painting Blessed Thistle is 7 feet high and 5½ feet wide. It’s monumental, bigger than life, and has an epic quality.”
A Future Monument, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 114"
St. Opuntia of the Bees, depicting a prickly pear, and The Constellation of St. Helios, the larger sunflower painting Sloan referenced before, are similar works. He takes these simple, ordinary plants and celebrates them in all their beauty. They are silhouetted against dark backgrounds, a light shining directly onto the lush surfaces, adding to the sense that they are, if only in a painting, icons. He does this in many of the other works in the show. Protected Landscape has the manmade element of the traffic cone front and center, while Blessed Finch, St. Heron the Beloved and Forest Descanso, focus on birds. However, looking more closely, the viewer will realize they are not paintings of animals, but rather paintings of sculptures of birds—bronze or ceramic.
Blessed Finch, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20"
“These works refer back to the old religious paintings from the long ago past of saints where they’d be surrounded by all of this glory. That work really interests me as a way to approach more secular objects,” Sloan explains. “I want to infuse it with a kind of devotional quality, because these are beautiful, important neighbors in our world that we share. I wanted to take them a step beyond that and elevate them. They’re not on a pedestal. This is something more important, and [we should] pay attention to this right now. It was an interesting challenge to take something so modest and say it’s sacred—it’s secular and it’s sacred.”
St. Opuntia of the Bees, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 66"
Anchoring the exhibition are the largest paintings in the show, A Future Monument and A View of Talisman Hill, which measure 84 by 114 inches each. Central in the works are monuments, the former painting with a wheelbarrow and other gardening tools atop a pedestal, and the latter, a more personal work filled with items that have meaning to the artist. Both pieces are about finding those moments to rest; in A Future Monument the pedestal is more obvious with the word “rest” engraved on its from, while A View of Talisman Hill has a garden chair where someone can take a break to relax.
Protected Landscape, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18"
The last painting Sloan created for the show was A View of Dawn on the Eastern Plains. Not only does it tie in Denver, but it also is about abundance and life. At the center is a honeycomb, which brings about images of pollination and spring, and the landscape in the background is an area of flat terrain to the east of downtown Denver referred to as the Eastern Plains. The dawn in the title may refer to the rise of the day on the landscape, but it could also be the dawn of something new—when, much like Sloan’s narrative, people remember to take moments to be quiet, still and just observe or when they take in the big picture, the small picture, everything that the world around them has to offer. —
Radiant Season: Paintings by Kevin Sloan
When: March 13-July 11, 2021
Where: Denver Botanic Gardens, 1007 York Street, Denver, CO 80206
Information: (720) 865-3500, www.botanicgardens.org
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