BIOGRAPHY
KEN KOUBA
Ken Kouba was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1954 and exhibited a natural talent for drawing and painting at an early age. Greatly influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and excelling in both mathematics and art in school, Kouba initially pursued a career in architecture. In 1973, he enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana where he was awarded an Edward C. Earl Prize for excellence in design.
Kouba’s paintings and prints of urban landscapes reflect his love for the beauty of architecture. His attuned sense of design, texture, light and color in the environment underlies his caring attention to detail. Indeed, it is the extreme detail and striking sense of depth and light which make Kouba’s style unique.
While people often have remarked that they have visited the scenes in Kouba’s works, they may be only partially correct. While the inspiration may come from a specific area, many of Ken’s paintings are composites of the places he has visited. Selecting various aspects of the sketches he makes, Kouba truly “designs” his scenes, painstakingly uniting elements from each sketch to achieve balance, beauty and mood. Thus rather than merely memorializing existing locations, Kouba’s works consist of his own perspective of urban landscapes wherein the light, texture and color of the environment are brought together in a unified design; scenes which draw the viewers into, and make them feel a part of, the works.
Kouba has been painting and exhibiting since 1969 and has been represented in many galleries in the United States and is represented in many private and corporate collections throughout the world. He is a first place award winning artist and has produced works in almost every artistic medium.
Largely self taught Kouba has made a self study of art his life’s work and has influences of Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and friend and mentor Chicago artist Robert Addison, who advised Kouba and appreciated Kouba’s early works.
His work has been featured in many newspaper and magazine articles. In 1999 he participated in the first and much publicized “Cows on Parade” in Chicago. His “Industrial Cow” was displayed in the “Cow Moo-seum” in the Michigan Avenue Bridge Gallery and for the summer on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street across from the Art Institute of Chicago. After the summer exhibit ended, Kouba’s cow was additionally displayed in Daley Plaza and participated in “Cows on Vacation” traveling with sixteen other “Chicago Cows” to South Carolina for the summer. His cow is currently in the Warren Weisberg corporate collection in Chicago.
Ken Kouba currently resides in Chicago, having lived in Western Springs, Illinois for 25 years, raising his two sons.