Kevin Webb is owner and artist-in-residence of 10th Avenue West Studios, one of the thirty-plus art galleries and related businesses in Bradenton’s Village of the Arts, Florida’s largest artists’ colony. 10th Avenue West features Kevin’s “Flame-Chased Copper” pieces of brightly colored synthetic pigments fused to metal, painted furniture, wall art incorporating original verse, and select pieces by other local award winning artists.
http://10thavenuewest.com/artists/kevin_webb
http://www.10thavenuewest.com/
He is also a poet specializing in the “slam” approach. He began to write poetry in the mid-1990s. His early work was cerebral stuff that merged visions of nature with philosophical concepts. At the time, he was painting furniture, and began incorporating the poetry into the furniture.
Several years later he attended poetry readings and open mikes in order to share his poetry. He happened across a poetry slam taking place in a bookstore and was asked to be a judge. The performance aspect of slam poetry intrigued him as well as the thought of poetry as a competitive pursuit, it seemed so ridiculous, yet so wonderful, that he began attending and competing in slams. His goal was to perform quality works of poetry, accessible to the general public; but to not allow the performance aspect to diminish the poetic. He attempted to strike a careful balance between the profound and the comedic, and it was very popular with audiences. The following two years he captained Cleveland’s slam teams and competed in the National Slams in Providence, Rhode Island, and Seattle, Washington.
The following year he moved to Florida and started his art career, continuing to incorporate poetry onto furniture, as well as smaller pieces that could be priced lower. Florida being Florida, he found that fish sold very well; so he created a series of poem-fish that combine bright colors with original poetry. Images of the poem-fish, and their poetry, evolved into two books that sold very well across the state.
The wooden poem-fish evolved into wood & copper fish, which further evolved into totally copper fish, which soon shed their poetry and gained brightly colored enamels applied with a torch. The enameled copper has since taken on its own identity, growing into colored panels and other forms. Recently he has felt the strong pull of poetry again, and aims to incorporate it into some new form of visual art, as yet undefined.