For the past five years I have been studying drawing and painting at the Academy of Realist Art, in Toronto. The curriculum is designed to teach skills & improve artistic visual perception and is largely based on the pedagogy of the 19th century Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris: copying from Bargue plates, drawing and painting from plaster casts, figure & portraiture from life, and still life compositions with specific technical requirements. Doing mastercopies is a means of learning how great artists solved various problems in composition, technique and expression.
I make art about the nature of the human condition. My figurative work engages with what it is like to have a body: to live, breathe, touch, occupy space, love, think, fear, hunger, ache, age and die.
My still-life paintings address the emotional and intellectual weight of objects, the memories and emotions we attach to and draw from objects, be it an espresso cup or a baseball.
For me, portraiture is a discussion with another human being involving their identity, character and physical presence. Realism is not the end goal but a path to the soul.
I choose to work in a natural realist mode, depicting the subjects as they appear while mediated by my perception. This is emphatically not photo-realism or hyper-realism. It is the veracity of the image as perceived by the human eye and felt by the human soul which interests me. In this age of AI, deep fake media, gaslighting & constant propaganda, taking the opportunity to carefully look at a subject and depict it as honestly as possible is vital.
Kenneth Vincent
2026
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