Dathan Kane has just completed a month-long residency at Visible Records, an artist-run gallery and studio space that focuses on contemporary arts and empowering the community, and is located in the Belmont/Carlton neighborhood. Kane’s residency is part of a joint project with the Contemporary Arts Network of Newport News that will see two Visible Records artists headed there to produce a mural.
During his time at VR, Kane painted the walls of the 1,000 square-foot space with one of his distinctive black and white murals, which he collectively refers to as “The World of Shapes.” The result is stunning.
Born and raised in Hampton, Virginia, Kane received his B.A. in art and design from Virginia State University in 2014, with a focus on illustration, charcoal drawing, and graphic design. He didn’t start painting until his senior year, but took to it immediately. After graduation, he embarked on a career painting still lifes and portraits. But this changed dramatically following a 2015 trip to Art Basel Miami. “Seeing the work that was there and the artists I’d been studying—having access to that was inspirational,” says Kane. “It’s not like I’m coming from L.A. or New York, where you’ll see a lot more of that type of art.”
Inspired, Kane took his art in an entirely different direction, going big, going bold, and going monochrome. “I was thinking of ways to create something, to develop a visual language that felt authentic to me,” he says.
Reducing his palette to black and white wasn’t such a stretch for him, given his focus in college. But this palette choice was more profound than mere facility with a genre, “Black and white has always represented the foundation of art,” Kane says. “The absence of color draws attention. When you think of art for the most part, you think of color. When color isn’t present, you tend to be a little curious.” And color may have had a chastening effect on the scale of his forms since the combination may have been too much visually.
Looking at images of Kane’s various installations around the Hampton Roads area, Richmond, and Baltimore, you’re struck by how individual the projects look, while obviously done by the same hand. You also see black and white’s timelessness and how its undeniable chic works so well within the urban landscape.
In 2018, Kane became involved in the public art scene. He loves working outside and he likes the way public art engages with people who might not set foot in a gallery or museum space, or might not feel comfortable in those spaces. “If you’re able to engage someone passing by on their daily commute and take them out of reality for a minute, that impact is really special to me.”
In 2021, Kane was given the opportunity by Contemporary Arts Network to present his work on a grand scale and create an immersive experience. “I was a big fan of theme parks growing up,” he says. “And I had this idea to create a visual theme park.” If this sounds similar to Yayoi Kusama, it is. But Kane, motivated by entirely different forces, is achieving a similar effect using paint only. For that project, he painted six different spaces in the CAN headquarters in Newport News, including walls, floors, ceilings, and objects in the spaces. It took about four weeks to complete, working 12 hours a day.
Kane’s installation at VR includes podiums and a framed painting mounted directly on the mural. Like visual exclamation points, these features draw the eye and set up interesting spatial relationships between the large shapes on the wall and those on the other smaller objects. The arrangement of shapes themselves, what goes next to what, provides opportunities for Kane to toy with space and depth, creating the illusion of three dimensionality, overlapping planes, and forms that seem to flicker back and forth between dimensions.
Kane painted steadily for about 16 days at Visible Records, often working into the early morning hours. He finds inspiration for his rounded shapes in organic forms, and he works without a projector or grid marks. Everything is drawn freehand directly on the wall, giving his shapes a pleasing irregularity. The one exception is the perfect circles, which are made using cut-out stencils.
After priming his surface and mapping out the design in his head, Kane sketches it on the wall, moving from left to right, using a paint pen marker. When he finishes this, he adds the paint. Some projects require a preliminary drawing, but nothing stays exactly the same since the texture of the wall determines what you can do. Kane is really big on clean lines, and uses a flat-tip brush to paint everything. This brush, with which he fills up massive expanses, is just two inches long.
It’s hard not to be charmed by Kane’s chunky jumble of forms that push up against each other and seem ready to burst forth from the constraints of their two-dimensional surfaces. They’re amusing and joyful, and also incredibly stylish. They tick all the public-art boxes because what’s better than inserting a little joy, humor, and beauty into the life of someone passing by?
