Recent Portraits, Graham Gallery, 2010 Instead of showing the person, my portraits describe how the sitter looks–at paintings. The excitement and challenge for me results from interacting with an individual across paintings from the past, discovering indirectly something essential about that person. The idea comes out of my conviction that a painting really only begins…

Ken Aptekar: DIPTYCHS, James Graham & Sons Gallery/JG Contemporary, 2006 “He stared at the house, and then turned and drifted on…. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.”  –Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, 2004    …

Ken Aptekar: Painting Between the Lines, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO