Kyle Stuckey | Starting Young, Staying Fresh

Kyle Stuckey continues a lifetime of exploration through art

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Kyle Stuckey, Paris Café, oil, 24 x 30.

This story was featured in the November 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

KYLE STUCKEY’S mother used to joke that when her teenage son spent an entire summer building a replica of a medieval trebuchet—a 20-foot-tall wooden catapult, powerful enough to send a pumpkin flying through the air—he just wanted to avoid some of the less-fun subjects in his homeschooling curriculum. For Stuckey, it was one more way of creatively using his hands, along with building a zip line through the forest near the family’s New Hampshire home, or constructing a climbing wall. “If something interested me, I thought: Oh! I can build that! It didn’t always work properly,” he says, laughing. He also remembers looking at architectural or landscape spaces and imagining how he could make them better, often with only the materials at hand and always with an eye to fitting in with the natural environment.

: Kyle Stuckey, Cotton Candy and Cobblestones, oil, 24 x 24.

: Kyle Stuckey, Pomegranate, oil, 18 x 24.

: Kyle Stuckey, In the Meadow, oil, 26 x 17.

Unlike many future artists, Stuckey wasn’t enamored with drawing at the time, but his fascination with designing and building was a prelude of what was soon to come. “Art is geometry, symmetry, visual beauty—like a lot of my childhood experimenting—so that’s probably why it came so easily,” he says. It was during his senior year of high school that he finally discovered his love of drawing and painting, and found out he was pretty good at it. From that point on, the kid whose biggest passion had been baseball surprised his family and friends with a 180-degree turn in the direction of art. As it turned out, innate talent and an uncommon level of focus and dedication for his age put him on an accelerated track. Now 33, he already has enjoyed 10 years of a successful painting career.

STUCKEY’S introduction to art was through private instruction from a painter and family friend, Lori Woodward Simons, who was enlisted to pro-vide Kyle with the art education required for graduation. “I went into it thinking, I need to do this, and it could be pretty fun,” he remembers. Among his first assignments was to page through art magazines and tear out photos of all the paintings, regardless of style, genre, or time period, that really caught his eye. When he finished, almost every image in his stack was figurative, primarily portraits by artists including John Singer Sargent and John William Waterhouse. “They were probably brilliantly composed in ways I didn’t understand at the time, but for me they were intriguing and had life to them, [posing] a what-if question—why did they paint this person, what’s their backstory?” he says. “It’s still true for me now: I love painting people, the storytelling and finding ways to capture them in that moment.”

: Kyle Stuckey, Backyard Bouquet, oil, 18 x 24.

: Kyle Stuckey, Portrait of a Woman II, oil, 14 x 19.

: Kyle Stuckey, Giving Way to the Night, oil, 36 x 36.

Stuckey studied with Simons for about four years, at first formally and then on a mentorship basis, and he also began taking workshops with other artists. When he was 19 he accompanied Simons a few times to meetings of the Putney Painters in Putney, VT, led by internationally ac-claimed artists Richard Schmid and Nancy Guzik. Soon he was one of the youngest painters invited to be a member of the group. Three years later he was selected for Southwest Art’s annual “21 Under 31” feature, which introduces young artists with potential. As a result, doors began to open for him, including gallery representation. Equally important was the confidence that came with professional recognition. “Before, family and friends would tell me what I painted was great, but once strangers say it, it solidifies the idea that maybe I am good enough to make a run at it.” Besides, he reasoned at the time, “I’m only 23. I have the time to make this happen.”

For a while Stuckey continued to work part time as a carpenter in his father’s construction business while building a collector base. As painting sales increased, his need for other work went down and the opportunity for travel—one of his favorite activities—went up. He spent time in Nevada, where he met his future wife, Taylor. Together they lived for a year in Costa Rica, for three months in a tiny studio apartment in Rome, and on the New England coast. Eventually they traveled to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Europe, Asia, and the West Coast.

In 2019 the couple honeymooned in Paris, the first visit there for either of them. While strolling through the streets one evening, Stuckey found himself visually arrested by one of the city’s countless sidewalk cafés. The resulting painting, PARIS CAFÉ, captures the qualities that draw him to a scene, especially the human, storytelling element. “I love that café culture, with everyone gathered around, enjoying each other’s company and enjoying being outside,” he says. He was also artistically intrigued by the contrast of warm café lights and cooler streetlamps. But what trans-formed the scene into a special experience was that after he had taken some photographs, he and Taylor sat at one of the outdoor tables for a drink. “It represents a memory, not just a beautiful scene,” he says.

: Kyle Stuckey, Hymns & Showtunes, oil, 24 x 36.

: Kyle Stuckey, In Pale Pink II, oil, 36 x 24.

: Kyle Stuckey, Morning Marsh, oil, 40 x 40.

At some point the artist and his wife were ready to unpack their suitcases and find a place to call home. They settled on Charleston, SC, attracted by the ocean, warm climate, and lively art scene. A bonus is the city’s historic downtown and handsome colonial architecture, as well as the marshes and Lowcountry landscape, all of which find their way into his paintings. Even when he’s not traveling, Stuckey always has a camera (or smartphone) with him and his “art brain” turned on, as he puts it, on the lookout for whatever suggests the promise of excitement and challenge at the easel. It may be a landscape, city scene, still-life arrangement, or interesting person—the figure remains among his favorite genres.

SOMETIMES THE painting experience becomes an opportunity for Stuckey to reconnect with the roots of his artistic journey—and to trust his own creative judgment. That’s what happened while he was working on IN THE MEADOW. The image of a pensive young woman sitting in the breeze among wildflowers began as a larger piece. It contained much more background, including forested landscape and an expanse of sky. As he worked on it, though, Stuckey realized that the painting was asking to be less. He pared it down to the essentials, creating a strong, simple com-position highlighting the model’s reflective mood and the quiet beauty of sunlight through the yellow flowers and her flowing hair. “I thought: Why make it bigger than it needs to be? I make the rules here. I can cut this down and make it what it probably should have been from the beginning.” The painting also became a sort of tribute, paying homage to Waterhouse in the wind’s movement and a romantic sense of captured time. “It’s going back to what intrigued me from the very beginning. It reminds me of why I started painting in the first place,” Stuckey says.

IN THE MEADOW also reflects a way of perceiving space that the artist absorbed while growing up. His tiny rural hometown of Stoddard, NH, is surrounded by woods, limiting visual distance to what he calls a “closed and comforting” range. Even in the cityscapes he chooses to paint, he finds spots with a “cozy, personal feeling—tight, narrow streets or anywhere there are quiet places in the middle of this very busy machine.” Painting evening and nighttime imagery is another way of tucking the viewer into an intimate visual space within a larger scene. Especially with nocturnes, Stuckey continues a lifelong love of experimentation. He asks himself: “Can you capture the atmosphere of light? Not the atmosphere of humidity or air, but the atmosphere that different light sources and temperatures and colors of light create in the dark?”

: Kyle Stuckey, North Light, oil, 18 x 14.

: Kyle Stuckey, Paris Light, oil, 18 x 24.

: Kyle Stuckey, Patina, oil, 20 x 16.

Although most of his travel has been on hold during the pandemic, Stuckey says that even something like a weekend trip into North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains is enough to kick his “art brain” into high gear. “For me, just seeing new places and things is inspiring, whether it’s extremely different or just a slight variation from the everyday,” he says. That doesn’t mean he deliberately sets out to find subjects. In fact, he tries not to try. He just sets out. Then, as he meanders through an older section of Charleston or along a beach, or sits in a restaurant with his wife, painting ideas tend to show up. One recent rediscovery has been a series of tonal works. Applying only two colors—one warm, one cool, no white—Stuckey paints familiar subjects in a way that takes him “back to the basics of drawing and using values to create form. It’s fun to explore that,” he says. Yet even as he dips into this more simplified approach, he brings with him years of training and experience. “I’m finding new ways to keep it fresh and move forward,” he says. “I’m pushing boundaries while producing what is still clearly a Kyle Stuckey body of work.”

representation
J.M. Stringer Gallery, Vero Beach, FL; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; Principle Gallery, Charleston, SC; The Marshall Gallery of Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Susan Powell Fine Art, Madison, CT; www.kylestuckey.com.