“My interests lie in the elemental rather than the narrative—pathos over ethos. By elemental, I mean the forces that underlie and permeate the natural world. I’m looking to paint what a place feels like as much as what it might look like. Painting is a continual negotiation between seeing and sensing, between the physical elements before me and my emotive response to them. It is within this nexus that mystery emerges.”

 

For Kidd, painting becomes a site of encounter—where perception and emotion converge, and where the material act of painting opens onto something less tangible. The landscapes operate not as representations of specific places, but as conduits for experience, inviting viewers into a space where the familiar gives way to the ineffable and the natural world is felt as much as it is seen.

 

Kidd was born in England and received his BA in Fine Art from De Montfort University in Leicester. He is widely recognized as the creator of day-through- night photography, combining up to 100 long-exposure photographs into a single image that condenses a week of time into one cohesive landscape. These grand-scale photomontages explore movement, duration, and transcendence in both urban and natural environments.

More recently, Kidd has returned to his roots and the inspiration of Cornwall where he and his family have spent considerable time. There is a definite link and progression between his vast day/night body of photographic works and his current paintings.

 

Kidd is one of the younger members of the four generations of artists in the Nicholson family and is the grandson of British modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) and abstract artist Ben Nicholson (1894–1982). In the mid-1980s, he moved to the United States, traveling across the country in a van for a year—an experience that profoundly shaped his understanding of the monumentality of the American landscape. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he has taught at the California Institute of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design, and maintains a studio in Venice.

 

Kidd's work has been exhibited and collected by prestigious institutions and corporations, including Orange County Museum of Art, Laguna Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, California Museum of Photography, California State Senate Contemporary Art Collection, and Museo Area Archeologica Arte Contemporanea in Cisternino, Puglia, Italy.