Kevin McGraw, Drinks on the House, acrylic on canvas
Kevin McGraw produced more than 100 works since 2025, a sustained burst of output on exhibit at The Potato Supply Company Building in the River Market. This body of work documents a significant chapter as an artist, husband and human being in response to upheaval inherent to the human condition, as Kevin and his wife Denise experienced firsthand.
While Kevin recovered from rotator cuff surgery, Denise shared that she had breast cancer. Depression, fear, reckoning settled in. The couple navigated physical recovery and an uncertain future. Returning to the studio provided space for Kevin to undergo self-discovery and healing.
Forty years of making art embedded in him a form of muscle memory — what the body can do, hand-eye coordination, learned and intuitive facility with materials and actions. With his experience in the how of artmaking, painting as a physical process enabled internal processing to unfold, surface and manifest.
The works on display fell into two groups, “Reconstruction” and “Full Circle,” signify disparate phases during this period. With “Reconstruction,” McGraw initially manipulated paint on paper with a brush or palette knife to produce small-scale work. Larger paintings developed into dense, tight compositions with color blocks, layers, bold lines, splattered paint and mark making as found in Drinks on the House and Pink Palace. More restrained linear arrangement is evident in the architectural composition of Convergence. A series of smaller works such as Purple and Teal present two color swaths side-by-side, a respite from the freneticism in many “Reconstruction” pieces.
The series, “Full Circle,” doubling as the show’s title, is grounded in a “borrowed language: the dots of the four-color printing process.” Cyan, magenta, yellow, and the key plate of black, or CMYK in printing and design parlance, produce a spectrum of color. Printing is an imperfect process, as McGraw knew from working in the industry after college.
McGraw repurposes the form and function of printing dots by painting them to develop his own vocabulary. Works in “Full Circle” reveal an artist and man visually expressing an internal vernacular. Coping with physical changes from damage and disease, managing emotional wellbeing and building mental resilience exacts a heavy toll. With “Full Circle,” McGraw flips this weight and leverages pain and depression into empowerment and celebration. Vivid arrangements of colorful dots became a playful, exploratory system to communicate the intangible and reclaim meaning. “Dots transformed into a way of visualizing growth,” according to the artist.
In an imperfect world, where physical processes are not immutable and the human body itself undergoes constant change, “Full Circle” represents an artist fully embracing the reality of becoming rather than the destination of a sought-after, inevitably unobtainable, ideal.
Decades of artistic practice, months of lived experience and concentrated studio work led to internal depth-finding and charting a way forward. The numerous works in “Full Circle” are sections of a map that collectively lead to now while also documenting resilience, gratitude and healing during a hope-filled journey.
“Full Circle: New Works by Kevin McGraw,” continues through October 1 at the Potato Supply Company Building, 140 Walnut St., Ste. 105. Hours are by appointment: 816.916.8121 or kevinmcgrawart.com. For more information, visit kevin-mcgraw.squarespace.com.
