Leo Kenney

Leo Kenney (1925–2001) was an American abstract painter, described by critics as a leading figure in the second generation of the 'Northwest School' of artists.

Kenney was born in Spokane, Washington on March 5, 1925, and moved to Seattle with his family at age six.

He was interested in art from a young age, copying pictures from newspapers and art magazines.

He had an early love of surrealism, and did very well in art classes.

Although an intensely energetic kid, he had health problems related to his small stature.

At one point in his teenage years he suffered a case of mumps so serious that he had to spend several weeks in bed, his weight dropping to 70 pounds.

He attended Broadway High School, on Seattle's Capitol Hill.

An art teacher, Jule Kullberg, sent him to see the works of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves at the Seattle Art Museum.

The influence is plain in his dark, figurative works of the 1940s and '50s.

Taking Breton's proclamation that "only the marvelous is beautiful" to heart, he painted "automatically", without conscious planning.

Except for a few portraits done for friends, he never tried to reproduce reality in his paintings, always searching instead for deeper meaning.

"He never saw the world as others see it," said a longtime friend and patron, Merch Pease.

"His work is highly personal. It's pure invention."

In the late 1940s Kenney lived in a small apartment near the University of Washington with the brilliant, combative, hard-drinking painter Richard Gilkey.

The two became fixtures at the Blue Moon Tavern, the locus of Seattle's nascent 'Beat' culture.

In 1942 Kenney's older brother Jack was drafted into the U.S. Army; shortly after that, his father died.

Kenney returned to Seattle in 1944.

After his mother remarried and moved to Long Beach, he moved in with the family of a friend, Jack Griffin.

He routinely painted through the night in the basement room he shared with Griffin, who was so impressed with Kenney's work that he took some of his paintings to the Frederick & Nelson's department store in downtown Seattle, which had a small art gallery.

Kenney's first exhibition, along with sculptor James W. Washington, Jr., took place there in 1944.

The gallery manager then brought Kenney's work to the attention of Dr. Richard Fuller, the director of the Seattle Art Museum, which bought its first Kenney painting, The Inception of Magic, in 1945.

The artist was just 20 years old.

At a young age Kenney had read Salvador Dalí's autobiography and the works of poet André Breton, and had become fascinated with surrealism.

In 1948 two of Kenney's paintings were accepted by the Seattle Art Museum for its Annual Exhibition of the Artists of the Pacific Northwest (the 'Northwest Annuals'); one of them, Third Offering, won a prize and cash award.

The following year SAM presented a solo exhibition of Kenney's work.

At age 24 he most likely was (and still is) the youngest artist to have a solo show at the museum.

As the Pacific Northwest's most popular young painter he soon found himself overwhelmed with commissioned work, and fled to California, where he would stay for the next several years.

After briefly returning to Douglas Aircraft, he stumbled onto a job, in 1952, as a display artist at Gump's, a major seller of Asian art in San Francisco.

He spent the next six years there, becoming the company's director of display, then moved to a different art dealership, W. & J. Sloane.

He painted only sporadically during this time, but learned a great deal about Asian art.

His fascination with an Eastern symbol, the mandala, led to a shift in his work away from the figure and into a pure abstraction of glowing colors and simple, geometric forms, detailed with obsessive intricacy.

In 1960 he quit his job in order to refocus on painting.

Kenney's 1962 experiments with mescaline had a pronounced effect on his art.

"I was never so knocked out as when I first saw Graves' Morning Star and In the Night," Kenney recalled in a 1999 interview.

"It was an epiphany to come upon his work - the originality of it."

Kenney was dumbfounded when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of American involvement in World War II, his Japanese friends from Broadway High were removed from school for shipment to internment camps.

"It was the awakening of my social consciousness," he later recalled.

An average student at best, he dropped out of high school on his 18th birthday.

He was promptly called up by the draft, but, being underweight, was rejected.

He went to work at the Douglas Aircraft assembly plant in Long Beach, California.