The art of Frederic Kellogg invites us to enter the private world
of a highly sensitive, patient and focused observer. Kellogg’s
gentle but persistent curiosity has been directed at a wonderful
variety of objects and persons. His art is possessed of a spellbinding
quietude. Its steady silence holds fragments of our familiar world
in a realm of timelessness and carefully controlled psychological
tension. Kellogg’s is an art independent of a particular and
repetitive style. He is at heart a realist but is too much the poet
to merely record the passing scene. He is a thoughtful man, one
who probes and ponders, one who tries to uncover, albeit gently,
the unseen character of everyday things.
Fond of urban subjects such as city streets, long vistas down boulevards,
bridges, layered buildings and crowded corners, Kellogg seldom chooses
monumental or conventionally picturesque views. He offers us an
antidote to the common experience of the contemporary everyman,
a person dulled to the oddities of the urban scene. Suddenly, for
one intense moment, one sees a fragment of it with an extraordinary
clarity and with unexpected affection. It is not often Kellogg’s
actual subjects that prompt such an epiphany but the artist’s
complex emotions about his subjects so carefully focused and tempered
by thought that they can be confidently shared with others.
Kellogg’s latest paintings of Thomaston and Rockland, Maine
possess the calm familiar silence of a New England town in the
tradition of Burchfield or Hopper. Deep night has become the favored
setting of Kellogg’s most recent work. He has chosen to dwell
in the depth of night for a while, watching how the human presence
has animated and transformed nature’s quietest and most poetic
hours. Typically, Kellogg has chosen an unexpected array of nocturnal
views and subjects.
Many Rockland residents and visitors are familiar with the friendly
Park Street Laundry. Full of busy people laboring in a casual
community setting, it is a beloved place of practical necessity.
Kellogg might have chosen to depict the communal egalitarianism
of the laundry and its people. Or else he might have presented
it as an island of human activity in a sea of darkness.
Late Journey (2002) offers a more complex view conditioned by
actual experience and long reflection. We walk past the front
window of the laundry being quite aware of its light-filled, animated
interior. Our own perspective is that of a pedestrian traveling
down the ribbon of light offered by U.S. Route One. The laundry
is a way-station, an outpost of comfort and help along the vital
artery that is the highway.
Kellogg might easily have engaged us in a narrative about the
laundry but he has focused upon a larger truth. Most of us, although
perhaps aware of the life and community offered by such public
places, engage frequently but very briefly with the people who
operate them. We are passers-by who notice but do not often participate
in the larger narrative that is the life of the Park Street Laundry.
Grateful for the service it offers and aware of the human dimensions
of our exchange, we nonetheless focus upon our own tasks. We are
intent upon our trip along the highway, our list of chores, and
we maintain the perspective of a client rather than a laundry
worker or even a person with much laundry to wash on a particular
day. The poetic of Kellogg’s painting rests upon the hint
of regret, the knowledge that most human encounters are fragmentary
and quick, our understanding that each little station of light
along the highway has a larger story to tell. It is an egalitarian
and open-hearted understanding of the American scene that Kellogg
offers in his work, a warm appreciation for the connectedness
and mutual regard that is the best of the American character.
One remarkable work of recent months is Kellogg’s Black Painting
with Telephone, a painting made of several large painted panels
joined together to fit an entire wall so that they virtually become
the thing depicted. Once again, we are in the position of the
person walking in darkness along an urban boulevard. Almost life-sized,
the lighted telephone booth looms in the darkness of night, here
depicted by the richly-inflected surface of Kellogg’s darkened
canvas. The telephone booth is an outpost of electronic communication,
a place of connection, a refuge in emergency, a place to rest.
In a state full of lighthouses, Kellogg’s wry sensibility
focuses upon a contemporary version of a light in the darkness,
something so familiar that we would not have thought it could
make a picture. But so it does, and one with such startling authority
that it brings us back to its reality and to our own patterns
of locomotion and social connection.
Kellogg lives part of the year in Washington, D.C., a big city
full of grandly public and absolutely private spaces. Kellogg’s
night views of Washington buildings are private and intimate glimpses
of time spent in perhaps lonely quietude. These are the images
of one who reads late at night, who spends time in deep reflection,
who ponders the meaning and import of events rather than just
chronicling their history. Here again, time seems to stand still.
It is understanding that counts, not the narrative of passing
news stories and personalities. A lamp in a window, a bowl of
fruit highlighted on a simple table, these are the visual talismans
of mutable time and space used by painters for many centuries.
There are many artists and poets who choose such subjects to express
a melancholy state of mind. Nothing could be further from Kellogg’s
purpose and result. The wonderful balance of his character is
evident in the expressive content of his work. Life is full of
flux and drama best understood by a patient, quiet mind. The glory
of being human is to achieve an understanding of life’s passing
events and to arrive at a state of equanimity and optimism about
the future.
Kellogg’s recent watercolors represent the culmination of
many years of personal discovery and quiet evolution in his painting.
They are the most beautiful and accomplished of his output in
this difficult medium. Finding typical views around town, he has
transformed them through his unique sense of color and light and
his sense of the unexpected. The beautiful and the unlovely exist
side-by-side in our environment. With a sense of humor and a warm
and tolerant nature, Kellogg finds room for both aspects of the
visual environment in his landscape compositions. Industrial buildings,
light poles, road signs and spectacular sunsets interact to great
advantage as he enjoys the many surprises and paradoxes they offer
to the painter. The result is something genuine, something truly
contemporary and much more than a momentary visual impulse or
a well-trodden formula. Frederic Kellogg certainly knows what
he is about and he has the courage to extend his inquiry as far
as life is willing to take him. Since life itself is something
of a mystery and always unfinished, as Edgar Degas observed, this
contemporary painter has many more years in which "to do
good things."
Susan C. Larsen, Ph.D.
Collector, Archives of American Art
Smithsonian Institution Summer, 2002