About the Artist
Kim Johnson
Kim Johnson is a Las Vegas native who has spent decades building a life around art — first as a child organizing her friends to find ways to share their work, and today as a full-time painter and mixed-media artist with a body of work shown across galleries, public spaces, and community installations throughout the valley. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her practice draws on that academic foundation alongside years of applied studio and gallery experience. At the center of Johnson's work is a fascination with the space between what's visible and what's felt — the emotional and essential ties that bind people to the natural environment and to the cities they build. Her paintings hover between abstraction and the figurative, often built around the human face and form, then selectively blurred, scraped back, or partially removed, echoing the way memory itself edits and rearranges what we choose to keep. Recurring in many of these works are clear, unblinking eyes, sometimes holding egg-shaped tears in the ducts — a motif she returns to again and again because, in her words, she's simply fascinated by eyes and what they're able to witness. She doesn't confine herself to one medium or one scale. Johnson paints large and small, works indoors and out — including large-scale outdoor and public paintings — and moves easily into assemblage and sculptural installation. That range is on full display in The Free Cure, an ongoing interactive public art project she started at the 2015 Life Is Beautiful Festival, inviting participants to write out their own "cures" for what troubles them. The project has since traveled to Left of Center Gallery, Vesta Coffee, and the Sahara West Library — where it drew more than 600 participants in a single stretch — and continues touring the valley as the Free Cure Nomad. Her exhibition history includes the solo show No Ordinary Life at Left of Center Gallery, along with Paracosm, Surfacing, and a body of assemblage work shown at AV Gallery. She's represented today at PTG & AV Gallery in Las Vegas, and her work has been profiled by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which described her as an artist drawn to the edges of the unknown — using the darker corners of her palette not to unsettle, but to face the mystery of life head-on.
“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.”
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
