Arts

Artist John Paul Kesling’s latest paintings picture Kentucky’s opioid crisis

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Nashville-based painter John Paul Kesling originally hails from Ashland, Ky. — a small city in Eastern Kentucky in the foothills of the Appalachians. Ashland has a population of about 20,000 and only recently got its first Starbucks. It’s part of the tri-state area that includes Ohio and West Virginia. The three states converge along the Ohio River in a region that’s now infamous as the epicenter of America’s opioid crisis.

Kesling recently returned to Kentucky to show a display of paintings at The Jewel Art Gallery in Ashland. The exhibition consisted of a grid of small portraits of family members, friends and neighbors that the people of Ashland have lost to addiction and overdose, including the artist’s brother. The scourge of overdose deaths has been haunting the area for decades, but in June it was announced that Kentucky shattered its previous record of overdose deaths, recording 2250 victims in 2021.Kesling’s ongoing series highlights the unique style the painter brings to portraiture, and it demonstrates how art can bring conversation and closure to the victims — and their families and friends — of America’s pharmacy industrial complex.

“I've always painted portraits. And just to make some extra money I've reached out just asking if people if they wanted portraits,” explains Kesling. “And I've probably done six or seven of those. And a friend of mine from my hometown reached out and she said that she had, you know, just wanted a portrait painted of her friend who she lost to opioids.”

Kesling hadn’t talked to his friend in about 15 years. He found out from her email that the woman and another mutual friend were both in recovery from opioids themselves.

“I was just reading this to my girlfriend. My girlfriend's from London and she doesn't know a single person who's passed away from opioids,” says Kesling. “And I was like three people in this one message have been hooked on it — two in recovery and one didn't make it.”

Kesling decided he’d paint the portrait for free. His friend was so moved and grateful at the gesture that Kesling thought he’d reach out and offer his paintings to more of his old neighbors. Kesling is still connected with Ashland via his Facebook account and when he put the word out about his portraits his inbox was flooded with requests.

Kesling showed other portraits in recent exhibitions and all of his paintings nearly always include representational and figurative elements. That said, Kesling’s work recalls early abstract painting, and the people, animals and landscapes that appear on his large canvases are often weirdly distorted by the artist’s sci-fi Fauvism which pairs vivid and varied color palettes with loose lines to reveal sometimes-almost-alien figures and spaces.

Kesling’s opioid memorial portraits represent an act of self-restraint in comparison to the art he continues to create in his ongoing studio practice. But, Kesling manages to bring his marks and distinctive color choices to these works while also capturing his subjects using the photo images his friends send him via email and text message. The results are more creatively interesting than traditional portraits might be, and the contemporary look of the pieces reminds viewers that the scourge of the Purdue-Pharma-and-FDA-created opioid crisis — which began in the 1990s — is deadlier than ever in the Bluegrass State. Kesling debuted his portraits in an exhibition at The Jewel Art Gallery in Ashland over the weekend of July 9-10.

“It was way heavy. I mean, I knew it was gonna be heavy, but at 10 a.m. on Friday there was a whole family waiting outside,” says Kesling. “It was the mother of a guy who was like a local high school football guy, kind of a legend around here. They called him like the hometown Thor, cuz he had like this long red hair. His mother was holding his daughter who was like, I would say a year old. She had long red hair too. And she's like pointing at his portrait saying, ‘That's your daddy there.’”

See Kesling’s ongoing memorial portrait series and more at www. johnpaulkesling.com