Country roads and city streets through the eyes of Ken Krug

The title of artist Ken Krug’s new show, “Country Roads and City Streets” says exactly what it is: a collection of small, observant paintings rooted in the two places he knows best — New York City and West Cornwall, Connecticut. The show opens April 26 at Souterrain Gallery in West Cornwall, the town where Krug and his wife Liz Van Doren spend most weekends and summers. “I realized I’d been painting a lot of roads,” he said. “In the city, you look at streets. In the country, you look at roads.” It sounds like a metaphor, and maybe it is — for duality, for motion, for Krug’s own career which spans fine art, children’s books, textile design, and teaching.

The show is comprised mostly of small paintings, many born from the prolific sketching Krug does often while waiting in his car for alternate-side parking, a time sucking practice that anyone with a vehicle in New York is intimately familiar with. “I probably fill 100 pages of sketches every couple of weeks,” said Krug, flipping through a stack of sketchbooks. “A lot of those ideas came from just sitting and drawing when I’m in the car.” Other works pull from more pastoral moments — milkweed in summer and in winter, long winding roads at dusk.

What unifies the work is perhaps not subject but feeling. Krug is most interested in capturing a sensation. “For me, painting is sharing my experience of looking at things,” he said. “It’s like telling someone a story.” He doesn’t expect viewers to see what he sees. “I just want them to feel something,” he said. “Whatever it is. That’s the emotional truth.”

“City Steam”by Ken KrugProvided

Krug was that kid drawing with chalk on the sidewalk until the light faded. “I remember being disappointed because nobody had cameras in those days, so whatever I was doing was gone the next day,” he said. That compulsion to capture impermanence may have stuck. Krug doesn’t romanticize process or product. He paints quickly, often reworks pieces, and is not especially precious. “I used to do very detailed paintings,” he said. “Now I want something simpler. I don’t want to spend a lot of time because it starts to lose some of that spontaneity.”

Yet his work has endured in some surprising places. His paintings appear in the film, “You Can Count on Me,” starring Laura Linney, and he illustrated Michelle Obama’s “White House Garden,” a job that came via proposal and then, months later, a call saying the White House had chosen him. Krug has written and illustrated his own books including “No, Silly!” which landed on Bank Street College’s Best Books of 2016 list, and has designed textiles for companies you’ve probably bought from without knowing.“That’s the thing I do love about commercial work, and I always tell my students this — you know, many of the textile designs or illustrations I’m doing are not for products I like, not for something I would really want in my house. But I love the problem solving.”

“Lilacs in a Green Jar” by Ken KrugProvided

But it’s painting — the part of his practice with no client, no invoice, and no guaranteed outcome — that keeps pulling him back. “When I’m painting, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I can fail, and it doesn’t matter. That’s what I like about it.” Failure, for Krug, is part of the process. Many works in the show began as something else but ended up being scraped away, flipped upside down, reimagined. “One of my favorite pieces in this show came out of a failed painting,” he said. “I turned it upside down and thought, ‘Oh, that’s the interesting part.’” Painting for Krug is a constant companion — daily, unceremonious, a little compulsive. “I even find myself if I’m outside, like, I’m drawing with my hand even though there’s no paper or anything there.”

“I do a lot of painting of all sorts, all the time,” said Krug, which sounds like false modesty but isn’t. In fact, Krug is already thinking of what’s next, of how the road he ran on this morning in Cornwall could be painted better now that he’s looked at it again. “Now I know what I want to do,” he mused. “Whenever I’m ready to show the work,” he said, “is when I’m kind of ready to do the next thing.”