Getting Closer: Paintings against poverty by Urs Josef Kehl

Why have this show in October?

Activist and thinker Joseph Wresinski gathered people in Paris France on October 17, 1987 to reject poverty. In 1992 the United Nations declared October 17 the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

What is my motivation?

Outdoors, in winter and summer, I paint the buildings and homes of people who struggle daily to live in peace. I situate myself in the heart of neighbourhoods where violence and social exclusion are felt, so that I may learn directly from the people who live there what their experience is of their community.

I need to paint. I need to look for the place where I feel the most affected by my surroundings. Then I set up the easel, take out my painting box and paint for a few hours. Afterwards, sometimes a few days later, I return to the same spot to feel and to paint again, maybe to cool down, to move beyond the initial excitement of creation so as to find calm and peace. This is how it goes for me, in the neighbourhoods of Toronto, in Switzerland and the United States.

Poster Exhibition ’Getting Closer’, Toronto Oct, 2010

(PDF, 65kB, click on the image to download)

Who paints with me?

All year I have been encouraging fellow artists to paint and spend time in neighborhoods until the streets, the buildings and people become familiar and feel important to them. I have also tried to find and contact local artists in the neighbourhoods where I paint.

The present exhibit includes, as well as my own works, paintings by three other artists. Guedouz Bendsidum’s pastel depicts a place in Paris where a man, close by, built a shelter to sleep. Doris Purschase, a classmate of mine at Central Tech Art School invited me to paint with her in at Bloor and Lansdowne, a block away from her home. Nelly Schenker, from Switzerland, having experienced poverty herself, has been writing and painting for 15 years in support of outsiders.

To stay or not to stay?

Once, as I was painting, a man asked me to leave his neighbourhood. I think he was scared by my painting box and just by seeing me walk around the neighbourhood for almost an hour in minus 12 degree centigrade weather. So, I moved on and painted from the edge of his neighbourhood. Today, those houses are gone, demolished. Place des Acadies in Montreal no longer exists.

Place de l’Acadie - Montreal

Will the neighbourhoods I paint disappear from History?

I think that one third of the buildings I’ve painted are now gone or likely will be within the next five years. How can people keep track of their past, their history, under such conditions? Couldn’t Regent Park keep at least one of its brick buildings for the next generation to see, as we do with castles?

And what about Driftwood or the Don Jail, and the Peace Garden at City Hall or the Martin Luther King Public Housing in New Orleans?

Who supports me?

My wife, family, friends and co-workers at ATD Fourth World Movement, in Canada and elsewhere, have supported and encouraged me in this undertaking, as have residents in the areas where I paint. Gary Smith, artist and teacher, urged me, in his classes, not only to paint but also to exhibit, to sell, to make my work known. Fred Dunn, peace activist and poet, commissioned my first painting, which was of the Street Health building. As a way of supporting the Fourth World Movement, Lucinda Knowlton offered me the use of her gallery, Studio 1234, for my first exhibit in 2000. As I’ve gone about hanging my art work on local outdoor walls and fences no one has seemed to object.

Thank you all for these magical, peaceful moments I’ve lived by painting outdoors, summer and winter, spring and fall, step by step, color by color on canvases and wooden panels.

Painting are inspired by: www.joseph-wresinski.org - www.atd-fourthworld.org - www.atdfourthworld.ca

Urs Josef Kehl, Tel: (1) 416 778 9376