Artists (Left-Right) Courtney Downman, Kim Wilkie, & James Paterson
Artist Kim Wilkie
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Colour is obviously essential in your artworks- it makes the images and messages speak to the viewer. What is your favourite colour and do you often gravitate to it when creating?
My favourite colour is Blue. This colour was assigned to me as a young child because I am a twin. I wore blue and my sister Karen wore red or pink. I use blue in my art, but usually with a purpose. Lately my favourite colours are neon orange and neon pink.
"Headspace" Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas 48” x 48” x 2"
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How has the media you have chosen to practice with, in this exhibition, reflect your personality?
Because I tend to implement my media in an intuitive manner each time I express my interior and outer environment- I guess it could be said that I go with the flow. The incising on the surface of some artwork to reveal underlying colour may connote my imaginative meanings which shows that there is more to me than meets the eye.
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Tell me of a time when an artwork was going in the wrong direction. What did you do to adjust and bring it to its finished state?
I don’t particularly think that an artwork can go in the wrong direction. To me all mark-making leads to a new expression and a new way to see things differently. I work intuitively with my materials and sometimes I paint over small areas and use something that is partially exposed or I paint over whole sections and start again with new marks. Because of this erasure and the build up of paint, the structural or textural lines of the paint make new forms and new lines that begin a new starting point as well. It is the revision above that leaves the surface of my paintings uneven. In the end it is the foreground forms and lines that have to make sense to me for my work to come to that finished state.
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If you could directly speak to the viewer, what is one key bit of knowledge should they know about you or the artwork to experience it?
I would let them know that my paintings being shown are informed by my years of exploration and experience with painting, coupled with textiles and embroidery, as well as the meditative and intuitive leanings in my fibre paintings “en plein air.” It is all this combined that has given me that sense of imaginative play that culminates in what is displayed in Earls Court Gallery.
"For Scarlett" Acrylic, Charcoal and Pencil on Canvas 24” x 24” x 1.5"
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What would be your dream project or location for exhibit and why?
I would like to paint and incise four or five large horizontal or square multi-panel formats in a large (tall) studio so that I could work on them all at the same time; One informing the others etcetera. (with plenty of supplied studio materials) They would be exhibited together in a prominent gallery room together for a solo exhibit. Why? To see what would transpire.
“In the past, I believed that there was a definitive path for my art practice and my spiritual practice, however, the study of both areas was just the beginning of a simultaneous journey. It is the weaving and crossing of these two paths in my life that compliment and infuses a continuous search within to viscerally express the metaphysical within in my art and at the same time my response to my exterior environment. It is the search for the essence of the familiar and semblance of a time, place or thing and not in any defined order.”
— Kim Wilkie
