ASHLAND, Oregon — Recently, I attended the opening of an exhibition on my work with other artists, Disguise the Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations, at the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University (SOU), curated by Stuart Horodner.
I met SOU painting and drawing instructor Kyle Larson at a dinner hosted by Scott Malbaurn, the museum’s executive director, and learned from our conversation that he had received his BFA from Sacramento State, where he studied with Tom Montieth and Brenda Louie, and his MFA at Boston University, studying with John Walker. As Larson talked about Walker, on whom I’ve written many times over the past 45 years, and said they were still in touch, I became more curious about his work.
The following evening, I asked Larson if I could visit his studio and see what he was working on. His journey typified that of many artists who received MFAs from prestigious programs then went on to teach in areas remote from the mainstream art world.
Previously, Larson had taught at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, which may be even more remote from the New York art world than the liberal college town of Ashland, Oregon. What do you prioritize when you make work in relative isolation and know you might continue to do so for the foreseeable future? Do you focus on the trends of the market, hoping to become part of the scene, or do you make art in your studio and, as the poet Frank O’Hara, who rejected the establishment’s taste for somber confession, declared, “just go on your nerve”? I had the feeling that Larson had chosen the latter, and I wanted to see where this had led him.
Larson works in a large, empty classroom, where students sometimes hold studio classes, and stores his art elsewhere. It is the most austere studio I have ever visited because of its cold institutional setting. His environment and experiences seem to be reflected in his paintings: desert landscapes overlaid by transparent areas marked by lines that evoke natural phenomena, such as surging waves or beams of light descending from the sky.
The undulating desert is populated by dead trees of varying sizes, fish, dune buggy-like cars, bugs, birds, pigs, celestial orbs, and imagined creatures. Amid this hubbub, and acting as a witness, Larson depicts a painting on an easel and artist’s tools, though often there is no sign of the artist. And when there is, he is only partly visible or semi-transparent, as in Francis Picabia’s transparencies and George L.K. Morris’s manipulation of Cubist planes. The paintings are views into the crumbling, turbulent world humans have inhabited.
Larson has transformed John Walker’s nuanced evocations of the Maine shoreline, and Seal Point, Maine, where he has worked for many years. While I can make a connection between Larson’s use of a high horizon line and Walker’s paintings of teeming mud, water, and sky, and more tenuous connections to Picabia, Morris, and artists such as Philip Guston, and his image of the solitary artist, I don’t find the work derivative. Larson is determinedly excavating a distinctive vision.
In Larson’s art, Walker’s high-horizoned meetings of sky and mud have been replaced by the plains, mountains, and hills of Oklahoma and Oregon. Oklahoma, in particular, is a state in which one does not have to look far to see evidence of mining disasters, deteriorating towns, and decaying villages marked by poverty. And yet for all their rootedness in the specificities of his circumstances, Larson’s paintings exceed their sources, and become something else. To say they are about human-caused environmental disaster or climate change is too reductive.
In “Last Holdout” (2024), Larson depicts the left arm of an unseen figure clutching a stretched canvas that faces away from us. The figure appears to be half-buried in dirt and their head is not visible. Lines around the figure evoke wavelengths from an unknown source, while beams of light descending from the top edge of the canvas suggest otherworldly presences. The longer we look at the artist’s expansive paintings, the more we see. In the foreground, the figure’s hand holds a long-stemmed red flower, the only use of that color in an otherwise dark and moody palette. Larson does not depict the visible world, but rather what we make of it when it invades our dreams and anxieties. His paintings invite us into a layered world we can move around and get lost in, without a destination.
