Delaware Valley Art League

Kim Hoechst Biography:

 

Kim is an artist who embraces the practice of perceptual painting. She seeks to create a believable, atmospheric visual experience for the viewer through careful attention to unified color relationships that capture conditions of light and space. Form in her paintings emerges from these unified color foundations.  Recently, she began working primarily from life because this approach is most conducive to capturing a sensory response to her subject matter.

 

Kim has been an artist for over fifteen years.  She built the foundation for her oil painting skills through extensive study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  More recently she completed Master Class studies with Brooklyn artist, Christine LaFuente, and she is currently engaged in ongoing private study with Peter Van Dyck, a Philadelphia-based artist and teacher at PAFA who was educated at The Florence Academy of Art in Italy.  Kim exhibits her work at fine art galleries in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs.  She is a member of Oil Painters of America (OPA), an organization dedicated to the preservation of representational painting, and the Delaware Valley Art League.

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Demo:

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The demo will address the theme of the workshop: how to create a greater sense of light and atmosphere in a representational painting.  The medium will be oil paint.

 

I will discuss the difference between painting from life versus photographs, show examples of atmospheric work from artists who have inspired me and from my own portfolio and introduce the key concepts of creating a color key, identifying and integrating the light source in the composition and the benefits of working from extremely general to more specific.

 

I will have a simple still life set up from which I will paint.  I will start by doing a color mixing demo to create the color key, and then will demonstrate a way to begin the painting with a simplified block in.  From there I will lay in large masses of color and then demonstrate how to layer details into these large masses to develop the painting.  (I will probably not be able to finish the painting in this time frame, but I will have examples of finished work on hand so people can see the end result).

 

Workshop Description:

 

This workshop will address the concept of creating a sense of space and atmosphere that transcends the specific objects and details in still life (although it could be applied to any representational genre.). We will explore how form and details emerge from a broader block-in of the painting structured from closely-held color relationships.

 

We will start by considering the importance of color relationships and creating a color key at the outset of making the painting by using the color wheel and doing a color mixing exercise using a limited palette.

 

We will address how to build the painting by identifying large shapes and observing how light moves through the composition by creating a block in through two different approaches:

• imprimatura (toning the canvas with transparent paint and wiping out the light areas)

• Simplified drawing in paint of the large shapes to which broad areas of color can be applied and details can be layered in as the painting progresses.

 

Participants can choose the approach with which they feel more comfortable to start their painting.

 

We will then focus on how to organize and apply color to create space and form working from general to more specific.

 

It is my hope that participants walk away with a sense for how to work simply and safely in oils if this is a new medium for them, and that they will gain an understanding of one approach to creating a unified, atmospheric painting.

 

Subject Matter:  Depending on the number of participants and the resources available in the work room, students will have the opportunity to work from either one large still life set up on a table that can be placed in the center of the room and viewed in the round, or there will be several setups on 6 foot tables that can be shared by multiple participants. . The concepts of this workshop are routed in painting from life.  Painting from photographs is not recommended.

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Click here for Kim's supply list (in PDF format)