User:Kis-Lev Studio/Forever 27

<!-- Forever 27 is the name of an exhibition by artist Jonathan Kis-Lev, dealing with the concept that many popular artists have died at the age of 27,, often referred to as the 27 Club. The deaths of some prominent musicians at age 27 due to "precipitous lifestyles that made them candidates for early self-destruction", has moved Jonathan ever since he read about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, as well as other famous artists, mostly musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and most recently Amy Winehouse, have all found their deaths at the age of 27. Approaching that age himself, Kis-Lev began noting to his friends that there is something "dreading" in approaching this age himself. Repeatedly speaking about the subject, Jonathan eventually began creating a series of paintings portraying his emotions regarding the 27 Club, that eventually resulted in the series Forever 27. This series of works exhibited first in Israel, at Gallery X, and then moved on to exhibit in New York, San Francisco, London and Paris.

Background
At the age of 26 Jonathan Kis-Lev had a fairly successful career as a painter. He had solo exhibitions in several galleries in Israel, had exhibited in Europe, the United States and Canada, and was considered one of the most upbeat artists in the realm of international naive art. This success did not come over night, and was the result of several years of efforts in developing his own style and wishing to be accepted by the art world. Being mostly an auto didact, his journey into the art world, coming from the "outside" was one filled with difficulties and challenges, in the beginning being rejected by 32 different galleries. Yet in his mid-twenties the artist became a known figure in the Israeli art world, his paintings being bought by Israeli banks, and sold in public auctions. This success, however, was not well accepted by the artist himself.

Having his paintings sold for thousands of dollars, Jonathan began looking for painters in history that had an early success. One of them, Jean-Michel Basquiat, had attracted his attention years before, being also known like an "outsider", much like Kis-Lev himself. He had researched and read everything he could about Basquiat. Yet his relationship was one of both attraction and fear. While Kis-Lev found Basquiat to be inspiring, and his works uplifting, he was withdrawn, to say the list, from Basquiat's premiscuous life-style, one that involved a deep addiction to heroin, and addiction that eventually led to his death.

"I love him, but I am scared of him", said Kis-Lev about Basquiat at the time. The black American artist made Kis-Lev feel "trapped" in a road that could lead one astray. Kis-Lev was moved and enchanted by Basquiat's success and fame, and yet was scared to end up in the same situation. He referred to his experience in his teens as an actor in theater and television, mostly in commercials and in a soap opera, and said that his greatest fear is to let "vanity win over" him.

Dealing with this inner struggle, Kis-Lev was shocked and appauled hearing of the death of British singer Amy Winehouse, briefly before he turned 26. The Grammy Awards Singer's death has shocked many of his friends, his girlfriend at the time being moved into tears. Kis-Lev said repeatedly: "it is due to the inability to deal with the vanity involved with fame." Winehouse's death moved Kis-Lev to think even more so about his own mortality. In a letter to one of his collectors he wrote, "I find it hard to paint naively right now."

As he approached his 27th birthday the young artist began being antsy, uninterested in celebrating his own birthday. He kept drawing again and again the faced of Basquiat and Winehouse, slowly also incoporating faces of other artists that have lost their lives at that age, in the beginning Kurt Cobain, and then Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and others. The sketches eventually found themselves being transferred onto card-boards, using spray paint and other techniques Kis-Lev was employing for the very first time.

Technique
The series 27 Forever began as small sketches, with white pencil on black papers, depicting the portraits of members of the 27 Club. Then, Kis-Lev began taking large pieces of cardboard, onto which he glued used rags. He then painted the cardboard in metal black paint, serving as the base for the painting.

Simultaniously, the artist began drawing the crude lines of the portraits on other cardboards, slowly defining the most important facial features of the artists portrayed. Using this crude sketch, he then used another paper to cut out a stencil of the darker areas of each face. The stencil, with the design cut from it, was then used to produce overall first impression on the surface of the rags pasted onto the cardboards. With the stencil the artist applied the white pigment through the cut-out holes. Building the face from black to white, spraying the illuminated areas only, Kis-Lev was actually using a technique he was well acquainted with, as he painted only on black background during the five years before.

The artist slowly began eliminating more and more lines from the crude sketch, until only those lines that were crucial for the facial features remained. He then created several other stencils of the portrait's autograph, as well as one of a cake with 27 candles. He also created a large scale stencil of the logo of the movie and TV series "Fame", and used parts of it in each portrait. Using similar styled letters to the Fame logo, Kis-Lev created the word "Forever" in a smaller size, of which he used as well in all of the portraits as a rather hidden object.

These stencils were the chief implement in creating the Forever 27 series. The artist then used only three other colors to paint the whole series, white, grey, and red. Together with the black background, these four colors created a dramatic impression. Kis-Lev reffered to these paints several times, stating that each and every one of them was carefully chosen; white, representing hope, divinity and holiness; black, representing addiction and death; grey, representing monotonousness, depression and decay; and red, representing passion, art and love, as well as blood and pain. These colors were interwoven, signifying the overall mixture in the lives of the portrayed artist, mixture of great creativity and passion, together with fear, desperation, pain, addiction and the looming death. Overall, the ruling colors in those paintings are black and red, death and passion. The grey is laying underneath, while the white is important yet scarce.