The Artwork of Christopher Vaughan Frye

"Digging and sampling from a variety of sources, Christopher Vaughan Frye, a native Kansas City artist and educator, creates paintings by mixing pop images with street art techniques."

Christopher Vaughan Frye was born and raised in the Kansas City Metropolitan where he continues to create and teach art. Frye received his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in Painting from the University of Kansas in 1998 and his Masters of Arts in Education from Avila University in 2005. He exhibits his artwork regularly, taught visual art for 14 years in the Hickman Mills School District and now teaches at Pioneer Ridge Middle School in Gardner, and designs and constructs sets for Blue Valley West HS Theatre Department and Stageworx Theatre Summer Camp.

Artist Statement- “Combing the streets and library stacks, digging and sampling from an ever-expanding cache’ of imagery, I create paintings appropriated from a variety of sources: time worn comic books, sailor tattoos, Saturday morning cartoons, classic pin-up girls, skateboarding sub-culture, antique signs, surf rock, roots reggae, and electric blues. Taken from the streets to the studio, my paintings combine the expressionism of graffiti with references from popular culture. Using photos from fashion magazines to obtain facial features, I create stylized portraits, the faces decorated with bright, saturated colors. Starting with bold, expressive brush strokes, I fill the void with slashes of bright colors, stenciled polka dots, and scrubbed over swatches of vibrant and overlapped pigment, which creates a patchwork of passion and energy. My aim is to create collision of vintage pop references which merge with an underpainting of gestural abstraction, reflecting the fast grimy pace of contemporary urban life. It’s this contrasting of techniques from the bold outlined facial expressions mixing with the spontaneous scribbles in the background that I enjoy in creating these paintings.”