"I'm really fascinated with the sort of idea of the abyss or the unknown, and approaching that cliff and looking over it. My work, it will feel ominous or dark, but really that's just me facing the mystery of life." · Las Vegas, NV
Kim
Johnson
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Step into the world of Kim Johnson — Las Vegas born and raised, working in oil, acrylic, and mixed media on a scale that ranges from intimate to wall-commanding. Her paintings live in the space between abstraction and the human face, where memory, emotion, and the pull of place all leave their mark.”
— Kim Johnson
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Painting Process Kim Johnson's studio practice is built around scale — literally. She moves between small, intimate works and paintings large enough to command a wall on their own, and she doesn't confine that range to four walls. Some of her paintings are built outdoors, in public, in real time, where passersby become part of the process. Her surfaces start in oil and acrylic, then take on mixed-media elements — texture, layering, and built-up passages that get selectively scraped back, blocked out, or removed entirely, echoing the way memory itself keeps some details and edits out others. Faces and figures emerge and then partially dissolve, landing somewhere between recognizable and abstract. That same hands-on, physical approach carries into her sculptural and installation work. For one recent piece, Triage, she sourced wooden branches and spent hours grinding, sanding, and polishing them with power tools before suspending them from the gallery ceiling over "earth vessels" holding clay sculptures and, in some cases, actual bone — a meditation on cycles of life built from raw material rather than paint. It's the same instinct behind The Free Cure, her ongoing public art project: taking a personal, physical process and opening it up so other people can become part of it too.
Where to Find the Work
