Kevin Sloan is a model for how an artist can be successful these days, and his steady practice has established him as one of the region’s most popular and sustained voices in the visual arts.

It’s not just about talent. There are plenty of painters with that, though few manage to coax the depth of color and texture out of acrylic paint the way Sloan does. It is more about establishing a style that is provocative enough to keep viewers and collectors interested over the long haul.

Sloan is best known for his portraits of animals — elephants, zebras, dolphins, penguins and polar bears — and in some ways they are very traditional portraits. His current solo show, “Devotion and Disorder,” at K Contemporary gallery in LoDo, has several of them.

His subjects are centered in his scenes, lit perfectly to highlight their best features, and both their physical presence and their personality characteristics are equal parts of the picture. That is not so different than the portraits of kings, saints, aristocrats, presidents and favorite children that painters have produced since the beginning of the art form.

Artists try to capture their subject’s countenance, but also hint at their demeanor, sometimes directly — with a smile or a smirk or eyes that look determined or pious —and sometimes indirectly, surrounding them with objects that symbolize associated character traits or the objects and hobbies that drive them. There might be a dog in the scene, or flowers, jewelry, guns, or slaughtered pheasants.

Sloan’s images have similar embellishments, though in their own way. His 2025 painting “Grande Finale” is a good example. It features a dolphin, posed as if executing a jump out of water, its skin shiny and reflective, its eyes looking back at the viewer. But there are also assorted objects surrounding this creature, flowers, shells, clouds, a prickly pear cactus, flames and other things.

These included elements hint that there is more to this animal’s life than swimming in the ocean all day. Sloan creates a narrative with a past and a future, some of it mysterious, some of it surreal, some of it funny.

In his artist’s statement, Sloan describes these works as “intentionally unfinished sentences” that the people who look at his paintings are invited to complete.

That can be an amusing challenge with works like “The Migrant,” which features a penguin, standing contentedly in a grassy field, far from any body of water, and surrounded by watermelons, strawberries, pineapples and pomegranates. There is a golden sunset in the background, giving the work, like many of his objects, the aura of sacred paintings of saints found in European cathedrals.

Some are less spiritual and more comedic. “Flight of the Meadow” has an elephant, balancing on one leg and standing atop a tortoise that has wandered up into the surf of some great ocean.

All of these paintings put on a show. Sloan emphasizes their theatricality by arranging flora — trees, vines, flowers — around the top edges of his scenes to resemble stage curtains that have been opened for the audience to see.

There are other influences in these works. With all of that fruit so carefully arranged, they are part sill life. With all those animals doing tricks for the public, they are part vaudeville.

And that is how Sloan maintains our interest, by conglomerating huge chunks of art history into every single moment, yet still making it his own.

To all that, he adds a layer of present-day environmental concern. In all of these portraits, there is an underlying tension that these subjects are battling forces of nature that threaten, ominously, to overtake them.

Some of his newer works take on this theme more obviously. “The Surrender of Caution,” for example, subs an orange-and-white traffic cone set in the edge of a saltwater surf for an animal as the central subject. But the cone appears to be off-kilter and it is being overwhelmed, slowly, by seashells, vines and coral.

Sloan is also newly exploring three-dimensional objects along the same lines, and three new works are part of the K Contemporary show. “Illusions of Safety” is an actual truck tire covered with actual seashells. “Rehabilitation of the Old Grove” is a real wheelchair in the process of being smothered by moss.

For sure, these three-dimensional pieces are ideas in progress, experiments in how to turn flat works into sculptures that pack the same punch. They don’t quite get there. They are overly candid, crafty and lack the ambiguity that make his painting so fascinating. That said, as a fan of Sloan’s, I was pleased to see them. To watch an artist who you have known for so long stretch in new directions, and have the courage to do it publicly, is a pleasure, no matter how it turns out.

And they do contain the idea that Sloan has presented broadly and deftly over his career, that nature eventually takes back the places and things that human progress steals and squalors over time — though honestly there are multiple layers to most of his output, and viewers do get choices on how to respond. They get plenty of options, actually, and that is another gift.

That open-endedness is really the key to his success. Sloan is a representational painter who is prospering at a time when abstraction rules. The art shown in top galleries like K Contemporary is more often conceptual, impossible to interpret without an understanding of the process behind it. For better and worse, it can be confounding.

Sloan’s work is just the opposite. Instead of giving us nothing to go on, he gives us plenty to work with. That is a generous gesture that makes looking at the paintings such a pleasure. You can go deep with it and worry about climate change, or you can giggle at the dancing bear or the parrot hanging upside down from a tree.

There is value in that for both collectors and casual viewers. Sloan indulges us, and himself, and who does not want to stick around for that?

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.