VAM galleries including this work:
Kentucky Folk Art Center | Animal Farm | Young at Art || VAM Home

This painting, done in Charley Kinney’s immediately recognizable energetic and expressive style, depicts a rural landscape with free-roaming wildlife. The animals are drawn with graphite and painted with tempera, and the work is outlined in stove polish. Like many of Kinney’s paintings, it is done on posterboard.

About the Artist

Charley Kinney was born in 1906 on a farm in Toller Hollow in Lewis County, Kentucky. Before 1912, his family moved less than a mile up the valley, and there Kinney spent the rest of his life. Born with an indented rib cage, he learned to innovate at an early age to compensate for his lack of upper-body strength. He showed interest in art during his three or four years of formal schooling, preferring drawing to studying other subjects. Because Kinney spent his life in one rural area, he developed an intimate knowledge and understanding of the natural environment that surrounded him.

Kinney was involved creatively throughout his lifetime, playing the fiddle, weaving baskets, creating sculptures in clay, and passing down and embellishing local lore. His subjects range widely, from childhood “haint” (ghost) tales to depictions of events from the late 20th century, such as men walking on the moon. Locally, he was known by different audiences for a variety of accomplishments. For a period of time in mid-life, he was best known for his music and for eerie-looking dancing puppets he constructed from craft materials and took with him to local fairs and events. However, it was painting, which he took up later in life, that gained Kinney the widest recognition. Though he may have begun to paint as early as the 1950s, his painting really flourished from the late 1970s until his death. Kinney’s work has been included in regional and national folk art exhibits and is included in many major museum collections.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: List the animals you see in this painting. What do you think they are doing? What do you think the artist is trying to tell you with this piece? What do you think this painting tells us about the artist and his attitude toward nature and the wild? Discuss the use of stove polish as an art material. Why do you think an artist might choose this material? What other household materials could you paint or draw with?

Activities: Create an animal painting showing animals that are real or imaginary. Write a story about the animals in Charley Kinney’s painting—or your own painting.

Charley Kinney’s paintings often were based on ghost stories or other stories and events. Read or write a ghost story and create a painting about it.

Links

Read more about Charley Kinney and his brother and fellow folk artist, Noah, at the Folk Art Society of America web site.
[www.folkart.org/mag/kinney/kinney.html]

The Berenberg Gallery has a photograph, a brief biography, and two additional works by Kinney.
[www.berenberggallery.com/artists/kinney_charles/kinney_charles.html]