Ken Van Sickle

“Ken Van Sickle’s photographs summon a tart romanticism. They fulfill the time-traveling brief of all great photography, granting onlookers intimate, keyhole access to Paris in the fifties, the New York Beat scene, Andy Warhol’s Factory. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke in that Greenwich village club. You can feel the sunlight on that sleeping cat’s back. And yet time and again you find yourself you have to check the date on the photographs, so contemporary do some of Van Sickle’s more experimental effects seem — his fondness for smoke and blur, for double and pinhole exposures, smudges and superimpositions all lending his work a sense of haloed perception, of fresh apprehension furred with the workings of mind and memory.”

A native of New Brunswick, New Jersey, Van Sickle learned the basics of drawing, painting and composition from his grandfather and later studied under George Grosz at the Art Students League and cubist painter André Lhote in Paris.