Kim Johnson is a native to Las Vegas and works as a full time artist. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from University of Nevada, Las Vegas and has decades of applied experience in studio art, gallery practice and connecting to community through art. Her interests are in depicting our emotional and essential ties to the natural environment and urban surroundings.  Many of her works hover between abstraction and figurative creating a mixed figurative style that seeks to express the unseen in what's just beneath the surface. Part of her practice is to work beyond scale, tackling both large and small works not only in the studio but also creating large paintings outdoors and painting in public spaces.


"Most of my works are primarily about how we react to our environment and our emotional ties to it.  I want to explore the idea of walking in two worlds, one on this planet abiding the laws of nature  and one that embodies perceived  mysteries of the universe and who and what we are in our essence. These works are often blurred, scraped back, blocked away or have large sections removed to simultaneously examine or rearrange realistic moments of the face and figure. Similarly to how we selectively choose memories and perspective in our actions, I try to do the same in my paintings with the familiar shape of a face and the selectively uncanny morphing or rearranging of its shapes and the shapes surrounding it. These paintings are not meant to represent any one individual but more of the essence of what they may represent through individual perspective and personal relationship to the viewer."

KJ