Kim is a full time artist based in Surrey, England and working in London. She has a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Kim has exhibited in a number of East London galleries and Degree Art galleries. Her work has sold to the Sainsbury’s collection, Earls Court and Olympia venues, ‘Jigsaw’ the high street clothing chain where it was installed in the Hampstead Heath store and to a number of private collectors.
W&N: Describe your work & style
KO: My paintings use the paper minutiae we all leave behind throughout our lives such as receipts, certificates, tickets, etc… and transform them into gigantic hand painted monuments.
Each item is fragmented and meticulously reproduced on a massive scale in very thin layers of acrylic paints, giving it a print like quality. By aggrandizing these items, the mundanity of the subject is elevated, giving the paintings a transcendental quality and a personal narrative.
W&N: Why do you use acrylics?
KO: I like acrylic paints because they are flat. It’s really important for my work to have a flat matt texture so I can faithfully reproduce a print or a document and the viewer doesn’t quite know whether it is a print or a painting.
You can view Kim's gallery here.
W&N: What artists do you find inspiring?
KO: A difficult question! But I really like Christopher Wool. There are qualities in his work that are similar to mine, he uses fragments of mundane imagery and keeps his work really flat. He actually works with silk screen but it looks like it’s painted. I really like the idea of printers producing work that doesn’t quite look like print and painters producing paintings that don’t quite look like they are painted.
W&N: What are your first impressions of Artists’ Acrylic?
KO: I really like the strength of the colours. Good, strong colours are important to me because my paintings are replicating fragments of data or documents and I want to replicate them as faithfully as possible. I need good pigments to replicate colours that in reality would have come out of a printer. Because everything is really flat in my work, the pigments will really show through, hence the need to use good quality pigments.
W&N: What else have you noticed with Artists’ Acrylic?
KO: I’ve also noticed the increase in drying time with Artists’ Acrylics – they keep wet for longer which is really helpful when you are using one colour and have to cover a lot of area on a canvas.
