BIO

______________________________________________________________________________ F. Kevin Wynkoop Artist/Adventurer
Art is not my occupation it has always been my calling

I Graduated from the University of New Mexico 1976 with a BFA in ceramics and photography. While studying art at UNM I benefited greatly from, and was influenced by New Mexico's rich history of indigenous art. New Mexican art tells the Native Creation story, speaks of the seasons, of mythological beings, and the animated power of Creation expressing life through the plant and animal kingdom. My love for this approach to art is woven into much of my work.

While there I learned Native techniques for building, finishing, and firing pottery. In 1975, following an adventurous impulse I hiked in to the Jemez Mountain wilderness area where I camped above a natural hot spring, sleeping under the moon and stars for several months. I taught myself to play the Native flute and made ceramic bowls from wild mountain clays that I fired in a makeshift kiln.

Having grown up insulated in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago this was a defining moment in my life, I felt ancient, wild, and connected to the land's creation song.

At that time my work was in several area shows* and sold through the Mariposa Gallery in Albuquerque. In 1976 I started a ceramics program at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, a program which is still part of their curriculum.

In 1978 I took a job on the way to Graduate School that turned into a 18 year adventure in the membrane lining industry. This is where I began the Bauhaus phase of my artistic life, because like the famous German School of Art, Design, and Architecture founded by Walter Gropius in the 1920's, my emphasis became blending artistic creativity with practical function.

In those years I participated in the design and installation of over 20 million sq. ft. of membrane lining systems, using the same materials that were being employed by Christo and Jeanne Claude in there "Running Fence" installation in Sonoma and Marin Counties in California. Their work was all about form, and very temporary, wrapping buildings, trees, boulders, and draping canyons.

My work wrapped boulders, and covered the sides of mountains, but those projects also had a function and many of those projects are still in place and functioning today. I remember reading in 1979 that Christo and Jeanne Claude's "Valley Curtain" which was stretched across a valley in the Grand Hogback in Rifle Colorado was destroyed by winds in less that 24 hours.

On the Hetch Hetchy Penstock project in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California the site was so steep we had to bring in Helicopters to place the membrane for deployment. On that project we wrapped a lot of boulders and draped the side of the mountain with a quarter million sg. ft. of membrane, and in doing so we safeguarded the ten foot diameter pipe laid down the side of the mountain carrying the City of San Francisco's water supply from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. That project is still functional today, how very Bauhaus, "Form and Function."

I've settled down in Northern Michigan with my family. I am back to working on a smaller scale these days, painting, using clay and mixed media for my pieces.