Kyle Allen  is a Painter and Environmental Designer living and working in Beaverton Oregon with his wife Julia and son Paul. He received a degree in Graphic Design with a minor in Visual Arts from Oregon State University in 2016. He learned art and design by watching his father as a child, but didn’t do much painting of his own until studying visual arts in college. After a trip to the Netherlands in 2018, he was inspired by Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, it’s complex compositions, use of allegory, depictions of people, and small discoverable details. He has worked professionally as an Environmental / Experiential Designer since 2016, creating storytelling spaces, sculptural installations, and permanent builds across the globe. He paints for pleasure in his free time and experiments in a variety of mediums. “My work explores an area where nature and human ideas meet in stark contrast to each other. Humanity creates order, abstraction and artifice, whereas nature is a relentless, timeless force that ignores human intervention. In places where the two contrasting ideas meet, there is a strange beauty that is core to the human experience; The mystery of abandoned spaces, discovery of something lost, the surreal beauty of nature taking over. In my work I amplify this idea by introducing kitsch and a sense of humor that make the contrasts more apparent. Art loses its context over time as iconography evolves and meanings are forgotten. My intent is to create images that stand alone without a need for context or narrative, and invite the viewer to investigate and explore the mystery and tensions of these contrasts.”