DESCRIPTION OF WORK

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“I’m described as a contemporary impressionist with a basis in design and composition,” says Ken Auster. “I work only in oils, and my paintings are very ‘juicy,’ very loose and very of-the-moment.” Auster pays special attention to the edge between nature and man-made objects. While the majority of his work consists of interiors, cityscapes and freeways, there also is an occasional landscape with a human element as well as paintings of the local surf scene. “The dynamic between the biomorphic shapes of nature and the geometric shapes of man creates a nice tension as well as the opportunity for what I call ‘focal point,’” Auster says. His focal-point idea is based on the human eye’s capability of seeing only 25 percent of a particular scene in focus at one time. This inspired him to create a similar focal point in each of his paintings. The remainder of the painting becomes more abstract and borders on the periphery.

METHOD OF WORK

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Auster believes there are two aspects to painting: the intellectual and the passionate. In order to paint passionately, he explains, you must first intellectualize the process. “You have to think about what it is you’re painting ahead of time,” he says. “Then, when you paint, you can leave your brain at the door. When you’re thinking of other things and not of the painting itself, you create your best works--those that are spontaneous, unpredictable and honest.” His challenge is finding a subject that will stimulate him through the entire process. “You have to find something that will last you at least two hours--the time it takes to paint on location before the sun changes completely,” he says. When asked how long a particular painting took him to complete, he answers quite honestly: “Two hours and 20 years.”

ARTISTIC EVOLUTION

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A self-described childhood doodler, Auster’s love of art began early. Growing up, his first renderings, which littered his homework, were of waves and surfboards. His passion for the sport led him to Hawaii, where he learned printmaking. Becoming bored with the process and desiring a more immediate and creative outlet, he started painting. He divides this stage of his career into two sections: “Painting what I have to and painting what I want to,” he says. The “have-to” side was his commercial career when he created designs and illustrations for clients. “As soon as I made the transition to painting what I wanted to, I became a better painter.”

ARTISTIC INSPIRATIONS

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Auster was inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints, which he encountered in the early 1970s while on a surfing expedition in Japan. “There were 100 views of Mt. Fuji with these wonderful split fonts of color,” he says. “As a printmaker, I was intrigued by what you could do by pulling color across screens. That one element, along with their incredible design and the natural progression of color, hung with me, and I used that technique in my printmaking.”

MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE

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Auster names Dick Oden, a teacher at Long Beach State College where he was an illustration major in the late 1960s, and Stuart Katz, a voracious art collector, as his biggest influences. Oden, he says, was “one of those people who would tell you something and then 10 years later you’d figure it out; he was on a different level, and he tried to force us to think.” What Oden did for Auster’s technique, Katz did for his confidence. Strolling into Auster’s studio unannounced in 1996, Katz, who spent years searching colleges and galleries for undiscovered talent, changed Auster’s career with four words: “This is really good.”

BIGGEST BREAK

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Bolstered by Katz’s approval, Auster took transparencies of his work to several San Francisco galleries. Most merely went through the motions, but Thomas Reynolds, owner of Thomas Reynolds Gallery, was impressed with Auster’s style and technique and requested more examples. Still fearing rejection, Auster procrastinated. Fortunately, Reynolds persisted, and the day after he received Auster’s packet he decided to stage an exhibition of the artist’s work. In 1997, “The California Coast” became the first of five sold-out shows.

AWARDS AND ACCOLADES

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Laguna Art Museum/Lincoln Plein-Air Painting Invitational, first place and honorable mention 2002, first place 2000; Carmel Plein-Air Invitational, first place 2002, second place 2001; Millard Sheets Gallery’s plein-air painting competition, Pomona, California, first place 1998; Bowers Museum “Sites of Santa Ana and Scenes of Orange County,” first place 1997 and 1998.