Opening Reception: Thursday January 7, 2010 6-8pm at ArtServe. Meet the artist! Exhibit located in Francie Bishop Good Artists Workspace and runs until January 30, 2010.
ArtServe
1350 East Sunrise Boulevard Fort Lauderdale, FL 33304

Jon Kitner is a practicing painter and a retired Professor of Art from Miami Dade College’s North Campus, where he taught studio art for thirty seven years. He is has a Master’s degree in Fine Art, Painting from Kent State University in 1970. During his career at Miami Dade College, Jon has won numerous awards and recognition, including the Arthur Hertz Endowed Teaching Chair for Arts and Humanities in 1994 and the Simon Bolivar Endowed Teaching Chair in 2000. He was recognized by the White House as a United States Distinguished Teacher in 1986. In 1988, he was awarded a Fulbright Teaching Exchange to Wakefield College in England for one year. In 2000, Jon was awarded the Innovator of the Year award from the college at large.

Jon has exhibited his artwork since the 1970s. His first one person show in South Florida was at the Meeting Point Art Center in Coral Gables in 1979. Over the next fifteen years, he has participated in group exhibitions and one person shows at the Greene Gallery, Gallerie 99 and the Barbara Black Gallery. His work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale’s Hortt Exhibition, for three years in the 1980s, including 1984 when he won an Award of Merit in Painting. Jon’s work is in private collections in Florida and Ohio.

Jon’s new series of “montages” are acrylic on canvas paintings that feature the juxtaposition of various images within the same painting. The images are incorporated with a desire to encourage the viewer to respond to the work on more than one level. For example, in the painting entitled, “Memorial”, the large, panoramic scene is of a South Florida warehouse next to a lake. But, cut into the middle of this scene are two smaller images, one of a mountain view from Colorado, near St. Mary’s Glacier and a view into a cabinet from the Vatican Museum in Rome. The inspiration for this painting came from a sketching trip to St. Mary’s Glacier where Jon learned that a young boy had perished the night before from exposure. While all of Jon’s images do not necessarily translate into a story, they are intended to spur in the viewer a variety of associative feelings. Currently, Jon is working on a series of paintings all based on familiar locations throughout South Florida.