Aiden Kringen

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Aiden Kringen lived variously in the American West and Mexico bastopol, Jalisco, Portland, Flagstaff before settling in the hill and vineyard dotted environs of Sonoma, County, where he is now based. In these very different environments, each of which possesses a uniquely picturesque natural beauty, the artist began from an early age to develop his aesthetic approach. Aiden Kringen has always had a keen eye for detail, grounded in a gift for looking closely at the human experience.

I have ways been interested in observing people, he recalls, and in the details of how we interact with one another. He put this natural ability to task when he began working on illustration and graphic-design projects while in high school. From his mother,... Read More

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Aiden Kringen lived variously in the American West and Mexico bastopol, Jalisco, Portland, Flagstaff before settling in the hill and vineyard dotted environs of Sonoma, County, where he is now based. In these very different environments, each of which possesses a uniquely picturesque natural beauty, the artist began from an early age to develop his aesthetic approach. Aiden Kringen has always had a keen eye for detail, grounded in a gift for looking closely at the human experience.

I have ways been interested in observing people, he recalls, and in the details of how we interact with one another. He put this natural ability to task when he began working on illustration and graphic-design projects while in high school. From his mother, an artist and graphic designer, he learned the fundamentals of composition and typography, the nuances of positive and negative space and the relationships between them. Using sheets of Letracet a system for transferring typeface proved particularly instrumental in developing a methodology for layering and collage, which continue to inform his works on canvas and paper. Aiden Kringen learned old-school techniques, hands-on and mechanical, in keeping with a Bauhaus-like appreciation for perfectionism, integrity, and hard work.

It was in 2011 that Aiden Kringen began painting in the style with which he is now most associated: a technique fusing drawing and painting, line and brushstroke, with fragmented shapes undergirding the imagery. Notably, this is not simply a stylistic conceit, but more a way of perceiving reality. Ever since I was young, Kringen notes, I havve spent most of my time observing people: trying to break people down, in a visual sense, into small categorizations of their features, their mannerisms, the way they twitch their nose... His hypersensitivity to likeness and gesture is key, for this is what distinguishes his portraits from those by artists who strive to depict idealized beauty as an end in itself. Yes, there is an undeniable beauty to Kringen's subjects, but it does not follow strictly conventional paradigms. There is an individuality, a capturing of idiosyncracies and eccentricities, of optimism and fatalism, light and dark, in his work. He is not painting archetypes, but rather illuminating the essential characters of real people in a highly refined genre of psychological portraiture. The fragmented linework, the grids of planes he uses as lenses to focus these characteristics, is sui generis but never gimmicky; above all it is a tool for defining and refining the features of the face, adding depth and definition.