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Ken Stout has exhibited extensively, including exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Butler Museum of American art in Younstown, Ohio, with solo exhibitions at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris and at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts/Mid-America Arts Alliance Fellowship in Painting in 1990, the Mid-America Arts Alliance Drawing Fellowship in 1983, and the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Painting in 1998. The "Journey" exhibition at the Goldstrom Gallery in 1998 represented his first solo show in New York City.
He is currently a professor of art at the University of Arkanzas. He received his BFA degree from the Washington University in St. Louis and his MFA degree from the University of Indiana: both in painting.
Ken Stout talks about this exhibiton, "The Slippery Slope". "The picture plane is a stage for me. It is a place where I can dream out loud. Sometimes the plot dominates, creating the actors and the setting.
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Other times, the characters and place create the plot. And always, always, there is the tug of the paint on the brush, the unexpected intensity of one hue placed next to another, and the geometric demands of the picture plane itself, all of which propel the painting.
Some paintings appear, at first, more "finished" than others. "The Slippery Slope" evolved early on as a sort of parable, demanding a tightness of handling. "Pitfalls" and "Dominion", on the other hand, evolved like dreams, where the suggestiveness of a quick stroke of paint took on much greater power than a detailed, spelling out would have yielded. To paraphrase Matisse, the painter must be on alert to whether his painting is ready in three minutes or three years.
The gouaches began a couple years ago as a daily discipline, a way of literally "figuring out" events in my life. However, after doing hundreds--and using only two or three to enlarge--these are complete little paintings in themselves".
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 Interactive Exhibition
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