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Meet Cody Kuehl

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Cody Kuehl.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Cody. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I have been an artist in the northern Colorado and Denver area for 10+ years or so. I was initially showing work up in Fort Collins at what was then the Gallery Underground. My wife and I relocated to Denver, and I began showing at galleries and art festivals. It’s been a pretty wild ride to bootstrap the biz together. I worked a full time job while I showed art out in different capacities and built it up to where it was sustainable as a career. It’s been a fun leap to make.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Initially, I quit my job to pursue art as a way to just jump into it with both feet, but I really didn’t have any history of showing or selling art. Couple that with the fact that it was 2008 and The Great Recession was just getting underway. You could say it was a bit rough. I ended up finding some part time and full time work in different places and rode out the recession.

The move to Denver was what really kick started art as a business though. There were just more galleries and events and as a result, more people to get through to see my art. Even then, we had some lean years in Denver. Finally, I broke down and got a full time job as a youth director at a church and had a ton of fun doing that. It also gave me the financial freedom to take some risks in Gallery space and events.

That being said, I’ve found the Denver art Community to be great. There’s such a great group of art allies that we’ve built. We have a group that we’ve formed from the first gallery that I had a while back, and we do events together. Last year we had a space in RiNo that we finished out and then the fire department shut down the building it was in for sprinklers. We’ve been looking for a new physical location and just haven’t found that right space again.

Please tell us about your art.
I paint work that is “more west than west”. I like to think of it as all of the archetypal stories and western legends that you hear, but in reality never really happened the way they say. They’re the cinematic moment of impact paintings that strive to tell a single image story. I’ve been working on some new layered and three dimensional stuff lately.

The work that I do is kind of a double edged sword because the western genre in painting these days is not focused on taking risks. A lot of contemporary western art is pretty safe, so it’s been an interesting challenge to make some inroads there but also find my own audience. On the other side, if you see one of my paintings then it’s pretty hard to mistake as someone else so I really have my own brand.

One of the things I’m most proud of is just being able to do what I love every day. I always said that if I was going to do art full time then I’d only do what I wanted content wise and I’ve been able to stick to that. Feels pretty good.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
My wife and I have a couple of kids and they’re growing up QUICK, so I’d like to dial back the travel for shows a bit and focus on making better work all the time. I’ve been running into a lack of creative time, and that’s what drives the whole business so I want to keep challenging myself to make better work all the time and kick it out into the world.

We had a gallery space organized like I said that fell through, and I and a few people are looking at the next logical space for that. I’d like to make some larger scale stuff and even animating some for my couple solo shows next year. Mostly, for now, it’s just a lot of conceptualizing what’s next.

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