Kim Bishop
While Kim Bishop is currently a San Antonio based artist her roots are in Austin, Texas where she was raised and graduated from High School. She received her BFA in Commercial Art from Southwest Texas State University and her MA in Gifted and Talented Curriculum and Instruction from Texas State University in San Marcos. After thirty years of working in the Art Education field she is currently working on completing her MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Bishop has maintained a full time studio practice in San Antonio for over fifteen years. Her extensive nationally recognized exhibition record reflects her focus on community engagement through the arts. She is co-founder of Art to the Third Power, a large-scale industrial street print press, Bishop & Valderas LLC, a creative group and 3rd Space Art Gallery. She is a part of several permanent collections like the City of San Antonio Library, the University of Texas San Antonio and A&M Kingsville along with many private collections. At present she instructs drawing at Southwest School of Art.
On The Artwork
| We Are Still Here |
I have always been interested in addressing social issues through my drawings, paintings and prints but for the past few years the disturbing news in our world has become almost overwhelming for me. So I have retreated to my studio to experiment with carving, painting and printing. In my latest body of work I am exploring the beauty of my own SATX backyard through woodcut reliefs inlaid with paint and hand painted/ printed 2ft x 4ft mono-prints. My synthetic color palette reflects my admiration for the colorists of the 20th c. and my childhood love of The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz being a place of escape and mystery with the lesson that “there is no place like home.” I choose large scale woodcut relief printing as a way of reaching back to my graphic roots as a commercial artist. I am drawing into birch panels with a plunge router, almost gauging the wood. Then I am printing my panels onto painted sheets of Lenox paper. I am using my plates as interchangeable components for my hand colored prints almost like large scale stamping. My imagery is of what I see outside my studio window without the evidence of humans but my compositions are symbolic of my human context. The more I make the less figurative and the more symbolic my images are becoming. In some of my compositions I am playing with masking out areas to create white shadows. After printing my panels I clean them up and inlay paint into the crevasses making them woodcut relief paintings. The nature forms are a sensual reminder that we must respect and preserve our Earth “home” and poses the question “What if THIS is Paradise?”
