Contemporary Artist
Paintings in progress...     | Biography Kimberley White is an emerging contemporary artist living in downtown Toronto, as well as Associate Professor of Law and Society at York University. She returned to painting in 2007, after a nearly 20 year hiatus to pursue an academic career. She studied fine art for a time at the Ontario College of Art in the mid 80s, before entering university. She holds a BSc in Psychology from York University and an MA and PhD in Criminology from the University of Toronto. Kimberley has been teaching in the interdisciplinary Law and Society program at York University since 2000, and is currently Chair of the highly interdisciplinary Department of Social Science. She has published two scholarly books, the most resent titled Configuring Madness: Meaning, Context and Representation (2009). Her current research and writing focuses on issues to do with law, art and madness; interpretation recognition and storytelling; identity, citizenship and power. Many of the questions and themes explored in her academic work are also echoed in her artwork. What to say about my Artwork?When I returned to painting in 2007, I became sharply aware of how different my immediate social, economic and personal conditions are from the conditions through which I was painting in the 1980s. In other words, I am not the painter I was. Over the past four years I have been exploring processes of storytelling, interpretation and representation though painting. My artwork to date reflects a sustained curiosity about emotion, identity and the fragility of the human condition. I am often inspired by people just moving about in the city, street art, media images and news stories, all of which I shamelessly appropriate, reinterpret and retell throughout the painting process. I believe that each painting ultimately reveals its own set of stories - stories that will again be reinterpreted and retold by each viewer/reader of the painting. I work primarily with acrylic paints and pastel on canvas. I often employ a method of layering translucent planes of colour, allowing the initial form to emerge organically from the background. I aim to produce images that are provocative enough to unsettle and engage the reader, but that also allow space for (re)interpretation. It is the variable meanings that are abstracted from the same image by different readers that is of interest, more so than any intended meaning read into the image by me. Emerging as a new artist, in my 40s, with a lovely family and full time academic career in tow,
has felt at times terrifying, ridiculous, expansive, true and somehow
urgent. I have grown to understand that while I may have managed to make myself into an academic, I am an artist. And so now, having taken over the front half of our small house as my studio, I paint as much as I can. I have been selling paintings privately, but have only recently made steps toward an opportunity to show my artwork publicly. |
