Remembering Kevin Kadar
By Mark Andres
May 2026
He was what used to be a painter’s painter, someone artists respect and admire but whom critics mostly ignore. One of the most hardworking artists in Portland with a long exhibition history going back to William Jamison, Kevin had his collectors and supporters, but if I mention his name to someone in the art community now it will often draw a blank. This might be because Kevin Kadar lived the art life on his own terms and did not fit easily into the local art scene and its social circles.
There are some artists you see regularly at events, but Kevin always struck me as an extremely private person in the sense a monk or holy person is private. I do not want to romanticize Kevin, but he lived a spare, acetic life devoted to painting. To my knowledge he did not have a regular day job or a wealthy partner or a trust fund, which meant Kevin lived his version of the art life with a level of integrity and sacrifice of comfort that is extremely rare among artists and not for the faint of heart. Call it an act of bravery or of self-delusion; in any case I consider it heroic.
If Kevin’s name often draws a blank expression it is probably because his work was always out of fashion. It was dark and tortured, obscure, often apocalyptic, sometimes nightmarish, and rooted in the 19th century Romantic painting. Kevin happily shouldered the burden of being considered old fashioned, but that was a silly, superficial judgement. Sometimes his paintings looked to me like what would happen if those one of those grand old men of 19th century American landscape painting, Thomas Cole or Thomas Moran, dropped acid. Kevin’s work was traditional in means but it was also continuously experimental. That confuses people.
In the early 1990’s I was astonished at his ability to consistently evoke the aesthetic of 19th Century painting without ever looking academic, tricky or cheesily old-masterish. If you know what I am talking about you know that is no small feat. If you don’t know what I am talking about, consult the legion of tedious instructional videos on how to paint like Sargent by making slick, vapid pastiches. There is all the difference between imitating the mannerisms of the old masters and learning how to see like them.
For example there is a square painting of Kevin’s in the Tacoma Art Museum of a middle-aged female nude seen from the back that carries an astonishing sense of the tension of the back muscles and the slump of flesh. The paint is mostly dark earth colors, but applied so frankly, economically and sensitively that you may even experience a fleeting and unnerving sensation of what it feels like to inhabit such a body. That is not about technique but about empathy. The only comparison for me is Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in Her Bath in the Louve, also a square, though Rembrandt’s is nearly 5x5’ and Kevin’s painting is just under 9x9”. Not too shabby! If you were a figurative artist in Portland in the 1990s and paying attention, you might have sensed a gauntlet being thrown down.
But then I had to completely revise my sense of Kevin when I saw his next show of paintings that looked like melting psychedelic fantasy rock gardens. I was puzzled by these goofy, sometimes garish paintings. I even said aloud to the empty gallery: “What the hell happened?” convinced Kevin had gone off the deep end. I still am not a fan of those works, but they certainly carried the shock of the new because the new is often baffling. Sometimes a figure would wander into one of these paintings looking lost as if from the set of another movie. But despite my resistance to this work, I sensed a different kind of gauntlet being thrown down—one that declared the freedom to be just plain weird and go off in a new, unknown direction.
How many gauntlets did this guy have? I wondered.
The answer, it turns out, was plenty. Kevin’s next show of dark, luminous Parisian cityscapes convinced me he really was in the end a landscape painter. These gems still astonish me with their sense of the nobility of the old architecture along the Seine in the late afternoon light. There was Kevin in Paris, the home of his heroes --Corot, Delacroix, Courbet, Diaz-- painting like he was taking up their gauntlet—guided not by their style but by his joy of being in their company.
Kevin followed his loves and his enthusiasms with an obsessive fixation, and because these loves were varied, he was always reinventing himself, remaining to the last, surprising. His work might have been rooted in a tradition, but there was no one who painted like Kevin. Many take up the tradition of plein air painting but very few can keep it vital. If you don’t know what I mean Google “contemporary plein air painting” to see the thousands of perfectly skilled landscapes cranked out by retirees in painting societies in the Northwest and elsewhere; all the paintings look like they were made by the same person and they evaporate in memory as soon as you look away. There are dead traditions and living traditions, and people often confuse them.
I can’t remember when Kevin and I became friends, but perhaps it was in the paint aisle of Art Media. Who was that handsome fellow examining the fine print on the back of the Sennelier tube of Vermillion? Kevin was generous in sharing his vast knowledge of art history and artist’s materials with other artists and art students; if you ran into him in Art Media or Utrecht or Blick’s you might receive an impromptu hour-long lecture on pigments that would make you feel like a complete novice. I recall one lecture that continued out on the sidewalk for another hour as I leaned against a parking meter as Kevin became more and more animated. He talked of the history of pigments like an alchemist, intimately connected to their secrets and powers of transformation. For example, I assumed those paintings he made in open life drawing sessions were a traditional earth palette of Burnt Sienna, Black, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White, only to be corrected by Kevin that he had fabricated a set of custom colors mixed from modern pigments Quinacridone Gold with Napthol Red, Diarylide Yellow and Chromatic Black with better tinting strength and versatility.
Kevin was as much a student of art history as the craft of painting, as I learned one evening when he, Joseph Mann and I went out for dinner with the art historian Henry Sayre, who had juried us into a figurative show in Newport. Kevin’s conversation ranged easily from Tintoretto to Lucian Freud to Elsworth Kelly to artists I had never heard of. I sensed Kevin had looked very carefully at and into everything in art history.
The last time I saw Kevin in October 2025 at Froelick Gallery on First Thursday he was examining a large painting by V Maldonado. I saw only the back of his dapper jacket which he wore elegantly, as he dodged, backd up, leaned in, following after every brush stroke as if it were a tennis match. What he was doing seemed so private I did not want to bother him to say hello, because he was too busy crawling around inside V’s painting. What I was witnessing was something Kevin wrote about in a statement:
“(Visiting) great museums I found myself transfixed in front of certain paintings, comfortably shifting into a state where time and space lost meaning. Often lasting for 45 minutes, with eyes squinting, slowly gliding backwards and forwards, side to side accompanied by the sensation of levitating. Movements became more refined until strangely there was the awareness of the sensation of entering the skin of the great painter after finding the exact coordinates of where they stood in relation to the painting while they made their final adjustments. While in this state I naturally asked, “How do you know to do that?”
Good question! One I would like to ask Kevin. I expect he would not be able to answer, but I once had a glimmer of what Kevin was describing, when looking at a Modigliani portrait of Cocteau in the MOMA I sensed for a second Modigliani backing up into the space where I now stood, we two separated only by time.
Despite his reclusive nature, Kevin was a regular fixture at the open figure drawing sessions at PSU where he worked in intense isolation among a room packed with other artists, his ears filled with cotton, and his eyes as focused as a raptor. One did not want to disturb him then either. Many of the vivid and dramatic figure paintings he exhibited during the 90’s through the early 2000’s were begun in these sessions and later developed in the studio. Kevin’s dark, figurative paintings with their sense of the body at repose or in extremis were precious glimpse into his unique dialogue with the model and with the history of painting the figure. Kevin was in his own world.
Kevin drew beautifully. When I curated an invitational drawing group show in 2018 at Gallery 114 I knew I wanted him in that show. He biked to a local bar to meet me, removed a short tube from his rucksack, and handed me a scroll of Sumi ink drawings about 8” high and over 20 feet long. Some of the drawings were made during rehearsals of the Oregon Ballet Theater. As I slowly unrolled this scroll revealing one beautiful drawing after another, all made in a matter of seconds with a deft but lively brush, I was moved by this act of trust to share his sketchbook, the most private artifact of any artist, without any editing, with a colleague. Unfurling that scroll was an unforgettable experience. Kevin told me that the Oregon Ballet Theater's artistic director, James Canfield, would ask to sit right next to him as he drew because he felt Kevin’s act of drawing the dancers helped Canfield understand his own choreography. When I installed the show, the scroll was mounted on the wall with just a small section visible. It would be great to see the whole scroll on display someday.
His show at Froelick Gallery of landscape paintings from Italy in 2023 was a fresh, new departure for Kevin. I loved Kevin’s dark and moody paintings of Paris, but these Italian paintings had a gentleness and atmospheric lightness I had not seen in his work before. Each painting was only 9x12” but felt like it contained a whole world of smells, morning haze, the sound of wind in the trees. The paint was applied with conviction and gentleness. I missed the reception for that show but when our paths crossed again I told Kevin how much I loved that show, saying I was astonished how small and at the same time how spacious those paintings were. “Oh you should have seen the paintings I made back at Cooper Union,” he said.
“What, were they even smaller?” I asked.
“No, no they were huge: 8x10 feet!” he said, "but my secret now is that I imagine I am really small, really tiny and so I can make those paintings pretending they are 9x12 feet!”
Was he pulling my leg?
He smiled broadly, a mysterious twinkle in his eyes, handsome as a French matinee idol. What a lovely man he was! I miss that smile, but I look forward to Kevin’s next show, because even though he will not be there, I know he and I will share in the same space, separated only by time. I think he will probably surprise me.
Rest in peace, Kevin. Your gauntlet remains thrown.
