There is a lot of superb contemporary realism being made these days; this article shines light on a narrative painting by a gifted individual.
Observing Life in Motion: Narrative Painting by Cody Kamrowski
By Peter Trippi
Cody Kamrowski (b. 1995) is inspired by what he calls “the ordinary world — anything from dirty dishes in a crusty sink to the buoyant roses of a lush garden. Everything is interesting to me.” And so his paintings depict a broad range of people, pets, still life, interiors, cityscapes, and outdoor scenes of anything from a highway ramp and tract housing to construction equipment and a bobbing motorboat.
Born and raised in Albuquerque, where he lives today, Kamrowski has always liked to make things. “I didn’t have many store-bought toys,” he recalls, preferring instead to tackle plastic model kits that resulted in an array of tanks, airplanes, and robots. That habit proved expensive, so the boy started constructing such items out of paper scraps, glue, and sawdust, often inspired by what he saw in movies and video games. His creations grew ever more precise and functional, sometimes involving springs or plaster. “I only started to draw and paint landscapes because of my dad’s frustration with my messes,” he laughs, and also because the family enjoyed camping and hiking.
Kamrowski’s skill developed through the after-school figure drawing club launched by his high school art teacher, David Welch, who also introduced him to John Singer Sargent’s superb watercolors and charcoal sketches. At the University of New Mexico, the young man majored in psychology and linguistics, but he reserved time for one elective art class annually.
“There Scott Anderson introduced me to figurative abstractionists like Romare Bearden, Susan Lichtman, and Cecily Brown,” he notes, “though I didn’t fully grasp his message about the importance of abstraction in representational work until a few years later.”
Like so many in his generation, Kamrowski graduated during the pandemic and began his career working alone at home. “I realized I actually had no idea how to draw or paint,” he confides, so he consulted books and videos by artists, illustrators, and educators such as Scott Robertson, Stan Prokopenko, and Andrew Loomis. Kamrowski has taken only a few in-person workshops, which have included drawing with M. Tobias Hall and painting with Ed Praybe, who helped him more closely consider every narrative and emotive element in a composition. As lockdown lifted, the artist began participating in figure drawing groups several times per week, and now he draws at home with gusto.
“In today’s digitally stimulating world,” Kamrowski declares, “we often forget to observe the real people, places, and activities around us. There’s so much nuance in the shapes, colors, and forms hiding in plain view among the stuff we surround ourselves with. I prioritize the scenes that artificial intelligence cannot capture (at least not yet): a home kitchen as a meal is being prepared, a mechanic’s garage at noon on a Tuesday, a garden just before it gets weeded.”
Kamrowski’s capacity for larger and more compositionally ambitious images is growing, and we can see in a work like “Close Quarters at the Cabin” (illustrated above) that he has mastered the arranging of figures and possessions that together tell a story — perhaps of boredom or tension, or perhaps of nothing but the way we actually live. We look forward to watching where these skills take him next.
Connect with the artist at www.codykamrowski.com.
This article was originally published in Fine Art Connoisseur magazine (subscribe here).
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