Biography

Kevin Rolly, also known as Kevissimo, is an award-winning mixed-media artist living in downtown Los Angeles and is known for his signature ‘OilGraph’ style - a hybrid of traditional film photography and oil paint. The works are created with no digital assistance and are in private and corporate collections around the world.

Primarily a photographer, Kevin was born outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and taught himself the art which ultimately became his career. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 90’s where he branched out into commercial advertising which brought his work to such publications as ELLE, Mirabella, W, Brides and Detour as well as numerous catalogs for companies such as JOICO and ISO Hair Color. But it was in 1994 that Rolly began to experiment with finding an ‘emergent’ look, of light coming out of the darkness but he couldn't achieve it through traditional darkroom or lighting techniques, so he turned to the only thing he could think of that was physically dark and enduring – oil paint. He took a 4x5 black and white print and covered it with oil paint which he then removed allowing the image to emerge. And that was the first OilGraph.

The early works were entirely monochrome, but soon his technique grew to include extensive montage, collage and encaustic wax. By 1997 Rolly had started to ‘perform’ his work live, completing the paintings in just 10 minutes.

The Pasadena Museum of California Art hosted Rolly’s debut museum exhibition “Until the Road Forgets” which featured his first large scale work, “The Awakening” which is composed of roughly 220 photographic elements. It was a twenty-foot 360 degrees panorama of Old Town Prague with flaming skies and figures floating in the air. This marked the advent of a visual theme that continues in his work - the merging of the spiritual and the material, the worlds both seen and unseen into a single image, where the photograph brought the realism, while the paint expressed the abstraction of the world around the subject.

Rolly does not shy away from difficult subjects even Biblical ones. 2005 saw the commissioning of the fourteen traditional “Stations of the Cross” which debuted at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and was followed by “Broken – The Last Supper” which was photographed with all developmentally disabled adults. He continues to work on the series “In the Time of the Judges” from the Old Testament book of the same name. Rolly’s aim is to express the raw, unadulterated narrative in its most honest form.

But it’s not often that someone bases an entire film around your work. In 2015 Kevin was asked to create a nine-piece original series as the centerpiece for the movie “Magnum Opus” directed by Kevin Elliot and starring Adam Harrington as protagonist Daniel Cliff - a soldier-turned-artist who encodes his work with secret information to expose government corruption. Rolly was on set to train Adam how to paint and photograph like him. The crew even dressed Harrington to look like Rolly.

Shortly after this Rolly branched out to include gunpowder in his work, igniting it on the surface of the panels to greater intensity to the work and was commissioned by SONY Pictures to create an original gunpowder work for the blu-ray release of Girl in the Spiderweb. He is now creating a series of oilgraph/gunpowder works to explore the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

Kevin Rolly has his home and studio at The Brewery Art Colony, the largest art colony in the world and is co-owner of Big Art Labs, a 160,000 sq/ft warehouse compound dedicated to 24/7 access to artists of all disciplines.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“You meet people along the way… The way stops and ports of call, villages of friends and lovers, all blend, like in a dream in the waking hours. This is how I see. This is how I remember. I cannot do it any other way. Light and dark. Gain and loss. The joys of giving and the pain of letting go. The lessons we learn along that road are often forgotten, for we are leaky vessels at best. We forget and journey back down the roads that are familiar. Maybe this time it will be different…

Filling up with life is both ecstatic and heartbreaking, yet we continually return to that well. It is still a hope, albeit faint sometimes, that continually draws us to travel further. We yearn to love and to be loved, to do something that is significant. That does not always happen. Brokeness is a necessity of growth, but pain is never wasted. Leonard Cohen wrote “There is a crack, a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.” In these images are my own story, my friends’ stories and, what I trust, are yours as well.”

I have always been interested in the hidden being revealed, both in people’s personal journeys and in my own. Everyone has a story. What I concern myself with is telling those stories with honesty and dignity. In each of us there is both darkness and light. To tell our stories without one or the other is to be disingenuous to our nature. In the end, however, it is the light that breaks through the darkness that I search for the most. Yet, the darkness still needs to be present. It reveals the need of the light while we are still in this painful theatre of our humanity.

For me photography is listening. If I do my job then the story is written in the image and ultimately tells everyone’s story. The process of revealing the image through the oil only extends the journey of the light breaking through. It illuminates what I believe is the world both seen and unseen.