Leo Kenney

Leo Kenney (1925–2001) was an American abstract painter, described by critics as a leading figure in the second generation of the 'Northwest School' of artists.

At one point in his teenage years he suffered a case of mumps so serious that he had to spend several weeks in bed, his weight dropping to 70 pounds.

"[2] Kenney was dumbfounded when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of American involvement in World War II, his Japanese friends from Broadway High were removed from school for shipment to internment camps.

[2] At a young age Kenney had read Salvador Dalí's autobiography and the works of poet André Breton, and had become fascinated with surrealism.

Taking Breton's proclamation that "only the marvelous is beautiful" to heart, he painted "automatically", without conscious planning.

"[6] In the late 1940s Kenney lived in a small apartment near the University of Washington with the brilliant, combative, hard-drinking painter Richard Gilkey.

As the Pacific Northwest's most popular young painter he soon found himself overwhelmed with commissioned work, and fled to California, where he would stay for the next several years.

After briefly returning to Douglas Aircraft, he stumbled onto a job, in 1952, as a display artist at Gump's, a major seller of Asian art in San Francisco.

His fascination with an Eastern symbol, the mandala, led to a shift in his work away from the figure and into a pure abstraction of glowing colors and simple, geometric forms, detailed with obsessive intricacy.

In their place appeared a long series of paintings that were variations on an inner circle radiating misty echoes like the reverberations of a gong.

He moved back to Seattle in 1964, and subsequent gallery shows were met with strong sales and critical acclaim.

[9] In 2000 the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington presented Celebrating the Mysteries, a comprehensive overview of Kenney's 50-year career curated by Barbara Straker James.

[6] In 2014, several of his works were included in Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: the Mythic and the Mystical, a major exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.