“What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

George Eliot

My drawings are densely layered, winding, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life. I am deeply drawn to the subject of nostalgia, best described by the writer Michael Chabon as “…the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection.” I find this ache to be poignant evidence of our human consciousness and attempt to capture it with drawing.

To draw is to record. As I work, from the first mark on paper, to the last, I am setting out to fix what is fleeting. Each drawing contains an accumulation of images culled from mental scraps and observations. They are made with a combination of processes, beginning by airbrushing an atmospheric base and constructing the rest in layers of acrylic ink, graphite, and gouache.

I render the same subjects, over and over with tender attention; depicting common objects that are symbolic of work and leisure and others that signify how we measure things like distance and time. I place these objects in the drawn landscape: big skies, the rural Midwest, or romantic seascapes, using landscape as a tool to contemplate scale and activate one’s sense of time. As our consciousness is brimming with incomprehensible mystery, so a strange hierarchy is created in each drawing through the sometimes-illogical arrangement of objects and space.

In my work, the human is never represented, always implied, a presence indicated through absence. This is communicated with a pair of shoes, an overturned beer bottle, a flannel shirt, or a black capped chickadee, as birds are an “indicator species,” a proxy whose attendance reflects the environmental conditions also necessary for human existence.

Amber Kempthorn explores time and nostalgia through drawing. She is a graduate of Hiram College, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art where she received her MFA in Sculpture in 2008. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and recently in More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art at the Akron Art Museum. In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a $54,000 Knight Arts Challenge Akron grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for her animation project, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley, a series of four animations visually translating Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes (1945). Blending traditional hand-drawn and contemporary computer animation, Ordinary Magic builds on the tradition of playfully merging classical music with animation, premiering with live accompaniment by the Akron Symphony Orchestra in October 2022. Also in 2022, Kempthorn was awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize Award for Emerging Artist and was the recipient of the Dan Tranberg Teaching Excellence Award.

Kempthorn is an Associate Professor of Drawing at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She lives and works in Hiram, Ohio.

“Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All (one) can do is encourage the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don’ts of voyaging.”

Wallace Stegner