Kim was born in Victoria, grew up in Toronto, spent ten years in rural Arizona, living all across this vast country, now she lives in the farthest reaches of southwest Nova Scotia. She studied at York University in Toronto for Fine Art and the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) for Editorial Illustration.
Kim has worked as a sign-painter and lettering artist, with interior designers, producing home decor pieces and murals. She has also worked as a scenic artist for clients including Disney, Holt Renfrew, the Calgary Zoo, and Broadway shows such as Wicked and the Lion King.
When she is not making illustrations, or working on commissioned work, Kim can be found playing with found objects, wire, and beeswax, or digging in her garden. She is drawn to the beauty in nature, the written word and the shared experience of being human.
Artist’s Statement
Most of what I do as an artist comes out of my interactions with nature, I take a lot of reference photos when I'm out walking. I spot a combination of colours or a pattern; I am drawn to colour.
Colours are like musical notes, in nature they are a perfect symphony. When I create a colour palette for a painting, I want to make sure the colours are tuned to one another in the same way they are in the picture I'm working from: I could tune the palette in any direction, I could disregard the colours in my reference picture and change them to anything.
I love that rocks wear a richer colour when they're wet. We all know what happens when you take a rock out of the water: as it dries, the colour fades. It is the vibrance of wet rocks that I love. I'm a rock collector and can't go on a walk without a stone or two ending up in my pocket. I can honestly say I've moved mountains.
I notice the pattern and play of light over the rocks beneath the surface, the shapes of the light are dependent on the motion of the water. I love that the outlines of rocks get distorted when the water runs over them. I love that the surrounding landscape reflects on the water as a shadow and makes the rocks super clear in those areas. There is the light reflected on the rocks below the surface, and the light reflected off the surface of the water: two different planes with moving light, one underneath the other.
Every moment is different; how to show this with paint? How to show that movement when the reflected shapes are changing constantly? To capture movement with paint when paint can only encapsulate a brief moment in time, has always been a quandary for me. It is always about capturing light, I am a painter of light.
