Michael Kemp demonstrates printmaking to an interested crowd.

Our bartenders for the evening, Russell Donda and Isabell Springer

Sean Sexton and Michael Kemp were introduced to each other by mutual friend Lawrence Hetrick in Gainesville, Florida in the late1970’s. After each was newly married, with babies, living in dismal trailers on raw land they reconnected in 1981. Michael and his young family settled near Micanopy on a ten-acre remainder of Simonton Ranch, while Sean moved back to Vero Beach on his family’s Treasure Hammock Ranch, ten miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

In unmitigated simultaneity, they built houses, studios, families and careers and over the years have visited each other to work, side by side, sometimes in the landscape, sometimes the studio.

Sean and Michael have many other interests in common: literature, travel, politics, cooking, environmental and stewardship concerns, as well as the comedies of austere living, worn-out cars and the belief that art must be central to their lives.

Drawing and painting have been their primary artistic connection, but in later years, intaglio printmaking became a cooperative effort with both artists working on home ground using the most archaic aspects of an already archaic medium: etched and engraved line.  Plates have thus arisen in either setting (an upturned skillet on the kitchen-range has sufficed for grounding plates) to be drawn, etched in a windowsill and sent through the mail for proofing, until opportune visits could be made to the studio in Micanopy. 

Alternative methods and materials (phone-book pages, mat-board scraps, unusual drawing and printing surfaces, tools and plastic-gloved inking prophylactics) are the adaptation of an innovative if cheap, “Kempian” printmaking technology pressed into service by its practitioners (a “school” of two).

With so much shared in this 25-year collaboration, the actual content and intent of their work is divergent. In the landscape, Michael, the rootless wanderer, goes searching (trespassing when necessary) for the spot that matches some prefigured condition or interior notion. Having traveled on foot, criss-crossing much of Alachua County and outlying areas, he’s made long studies of the rugged, unsettled vistas surrounding his life, working directly on metal etching plates in the field after executing numerous drawn and painted studies to determine a composition. Michael approaches the 20^th Century lessons of planar form and repetition through an art invested in direct observation.

Most recently Michael has explored the model in weekly life-drawing sessions, trans-figuring the best of these sketches onto metal plates in homage to Modernist figurative printmaking tradition.

Sean’s art is rooted in family land and business; he is manager and sole-employee of a cattle ranch on six hundred acres of family land, also his birthplace. In many ways his art has become a means of continually discovering and documenting this place. The vistas, equipment, elements, and wild and domestic inhabitants share the stage with the essential ingredient, cattle. His etchings portray all these subjects, as well as self portraits and the larger world of a 21st Century pastoralist’s life. They comprise a portrait of endeavor and fascination, rendered in traditional if unschooled methods, drawn from an intense study of art history.

Borrowing upon past and present sources, this offering of prints represents 25 years of dialogue between friends, the lives and works of two artists.

Bellamy Road

Photos from Robby Rucker - Gary Haskins Opening