Kevin Wright is a Southern Californian and a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He is a professional photographer and graphic designer turned painter and marble sculptor (or more correctly a "hybrid artist" comprising photography, painting, design, and sculpture). 

It should come as no surprise that an artist of the twenty-first century should be a composite artist, given the fact that our telephones, for one thing, are hybrid entities that combine the camera, computer, answering machine, calculator and what have you. We now live in a hybrid world after all. 

In typical trans-disciplinary fashion, while in art school Wright began to experiment with painterly and sculptural gum-bichromate prints made of light-sensitized pigments. Later he began to work with ink and oil paint, producing elaborate mixed-media ink works and lushly textural oil paint composites of faces and draped female subjects. 

In 1998, he began to translate digital photographic images into stone sculpture under the guidance of an internationally acclaimed figure sculptor. Within a year, Wright had progressed from studying the craft of stone carving to becoming an accomplished marble sculptor. Between 1998 and 2006 he evolved his hybrid vision from finely wrought figure carvings to mold-making and bronze casting. The sum of all of this exhaustive study can be seen in the Torso series. Wright's hybrid approach provides some of the explanation for his compelling and complex work; the rest is better left to the viewer, for seeing is another word for knowing. 

William J. Havlicek, M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D.

Past exhibitions:  Nese Gallery  Mission Viejo  -  Pierside Gallery  Huntington Beach  -  Bistango Gallery  Irvine