Ken Kerslake
| Ken Kerslake | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 8, 1930 Mt. Vernon, New York |
| Died | January 7, 2007 Gainesville, Florida |
| Nationality | U.S. citizen |
| Other names | Kenneth A. Kerslake, Ken A. Kerslake |
| Occupation | Fine artist, educator |
Fine artist Ken Kerslake (1930–2007) was, according to Dr. Tom Dewey of the University of Mississippi,"one of a handful of printmaker-educators responsible for the growth of printmaking in the southeast in the years following World War II." Kerslake's teaching career was spent at the University of Florida in Gainesville, which honored him with the title of Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus after his retirement.
He was born in Mount Vernon, New York. In 1958, fresh out of college, Kerslake was hired by the University of Florida to develop a printmaking program for its art department. He did that and went on to have a thirty-eight-year teaching career at the University of Florida. Kerslake was a founding member of the American Print Alliance and was very active in the Southern Graphics Council, serving as that body's president from 1990 to 1992.
Kerslake started drawing as a small child and began to consider fine art as a career in high school. His formal study of art began in 1950 at Pratt Institute in New York City, where he was encouraged by teachers Philip Guston (1913–1980) and Roger Crossgrove (b. 1921). With the latter's encouragement, Kerslake transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1953, where he received both the Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts. There he discovered his medium when he took an intaglio printmaking course with Professor Lee Chesney, a mentor who was to become a lifelong friend. Kerslake enjoyed his first teaching experiences as a graduate assistant to Chesney. Soon after receiving his master’s degree in 1958 Kerslake accepted a faculty position with the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Intaglio printmaking was Kerslake’s primary medium, but he also produced series of prints in lithography and vitreography. In the final years of his life he also experimented in computer-generated imagery, creating ink jet prints that he used alongside more traditional techniques. Kerslake did not limit himself to printmaking media only; he also painted throughout his career.
His earliest prints, created between the mid-1950s to the early 1960s combined different intaglio techniques on the same plate. For example, his 1955 print, “Evolvement” (edition of 20) includes etching, engraving, soft ground, aquatint and flat biting to produce an abstract black and white composition of richly textured values of grays and black. In Kerslake’s 1959 print “Witnessed Image,” abstraction begins to give way to “interpenetrating organic forms with strong sexual overtones,” in the manner of Arshile Gorky’s paintings, according to curator Larry David Perkins. In the early 1960s Kerslake’s imagery became grotesquely figurative in prints such as “The Shape of Anxiety” of 1962 and “Anxiety Devouring Itself” of 1963, where the artist’s inspiration sprang from such works as Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis and Breughel’s print Large Fish Eat Small Fish.
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