Kim Kimbro Essay
#11 Stanley Dorfman (Visiting Painting)
#12 Kim Kimbro (Response Painting)
When I received my visiting painting, I was excited by it (mostly because it was something so unlike my work) and yet found plenty of ways to procrastinate making my version of it. It sat in my studio for a week before I finally had an idea. And of course, once I put paint to canvas, my grand idea had more to do with the way I normally work and less to do with the source painting.
After letting my painting dry and refusing to look at the original for another week, I scrapped the notion of having an idea at all and just responded to the basics. I laid out some of the prominent colors from the visiting painting, chose a few of its compositional and linear features, and went to work.
The end result was a color palette that changed significantly as a result of working wet into wet. Some of the spherical and linear elements of the visiting painting remained, but many were burnished away in the process of making the piece my own. It was quite thrilling to start with the same DNA, so-to-speak, and to end up with completely different looking siblings.