Artist statement

Artist Statement —Gesture, Heat, and the Disparate

I am a gestural painter who came up through heat. For many years, I worked in hot kitchens—grill lines, dinner rushes, white plates passed fast beneath hot lights—and then I painted long into the night. My chef days were sweat and service; my nights were pigment, silence, and risk. Somewhere along the way, the two languages fused. Cooking sharpened my timing. Painting gave the pressure a voice. What emerged is a practice built on immediacy, instinct, and the unpredictable beauty of things that don’t match but still belong together.

I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and I still carry the steam of that place. My first collision with real art was at the Albright-Knox Gallery: Pollock’s Convergence and de Kooning’s Gotham News cracked something open in me at age seven. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but I felt it move through my body like fire. That moment stayed. It became my compass.

Soon after, the Martha Jackson Gallery moved to Buffalo, and I found myself inside a new kind of kitchen: the gallery as workspace, the exhibition’s seem, as mise en place. As kids, my best friend Reed Anderson and I skated past sculptures by Louise Nevelson, through rooms hung with works by Tàpies, Johns, and Karel Appel. I helped with installations. I watched artists. I listened with my hands. Those early experiences taught me that painting could be physical, alive, messy, exacting. A gesture didn’t have to explain itself—it just had to carry weight.

Over the last three decades, I’ve studied Abstract Expressionism the way a young chef studies technique—through repetition, failure, curiosity, and obsession. De Kooning gave me movement. James Brooks taught me tension. Tapies offered clarity. Norman Bluhm gave me breath. Each one entered my bloodstream in a different way. I didn’t emulate them—I metabolized them.

My currents materials include oil paint, charcoal on paper and canvas. I treat surfaces the way I treat ingredients: layered, scraped, torn, fused. A painting might come together in an hour or a month. Some arrive clean, like a fast dish fired mid-service. Others require reduction—worked, overworked, burned, rebuilt. I don’t aim for perfection. I aim for something alive.

I don’t believe in harmony. I believe in resonance. I believe in fracture, in contradiction, in rhythm that doesn’t resolve. My work is disparate by nature. Elements clash, speak across each other, find form through tension. A ripped edge. A burst of color. A gesture that escapes its mark. These are the moments I chase—when the surface resists and then suddenly, briefly, yields.

Painting for me is still action. It’s a kind of service. It’s also a kind of hunger. And in both the kitchen and the studio, timing is everything. There’s a window, a beat, a moment when the thing comes alive. Too soon and it’s raw. Too late and it’s gone.

What continues to drive me is the pulse beneath it all—the refusal to settle. Abstract Expressionism is not a chapter in art history for me. It’s a living force, still relevant, still mutating, still hot. I carry its fire across landscapes and kitchens, through canvas and flame.

Every painting is a plate served hot. Every stroke is a decision made under pressure.

Every work is a moment I chose not to walk away from.

Donovan Krebs

Monday, July 28, 2025