Transcript: Kim Merrill - Painter

For Arts Sake
Episode “Kim Merrill, Painter”

Kim Merrill: Becoming an artist was something that I resisted. I shouldn’t say resisted. I didn’t even, didn’t even come into my consciousness. I was driven to create is so strange. But in the Midwest, I don’t know if it is the same across the country, there is that phallacy about artist. Or this belief that somehow oh those are the gifted people. You know somehow god shines down upon them and their able to create. It’s not for the common folk like me.

And I think that’s what stopped me most of the time. To not even, it couldn’t even cross my mind that I could be or do that. I knew I was different from the other people in the family and I would seek out things to create. As a teenager I taught myself how to knit, crochet, quilt, all those things. I did all of the things that women in the Midwest did.

And then we moved to California when I was about thirty two, and because we were so enamored with the landscape we bought a nice Nikon camera. And I started looking from the viewfinder, and my life changed from that time on.

It was composition, it was all about shape and color and light. And I had been doing that with quilting of its kind of interesting because you frame in quilting also. Spending the first half of my life raising kids, being an executive’s wife, and then after I got divorced it was about the time ne of my kids was off to college and the other one had a year of high school left. For me at that point to decide that I was going to go to college finally.

The summer before I started school, I actually went on the school trip to Greece, never been abroad. You know I had been to the peace canons in Canada. That was about the extent of y foreign travel. And it opened my eyes. It broke the confines of what I thought y life could be. I never thought I would be able to do something like that.

So all new friends, new possibilities, an art career that was just a little bud, now it is just a little bit bigger bud. Once I had an object that I am working with. I start working with it in three dimensions, moving things around, different environments. Different lighting, and that’s kind of how I work out the composition. And then I will start taking photographs. Play with it in Photoshop, recrop it, maybe go back and reorganize the still life again. Add something else.

But it’s fairly freeform. And I really don’t feel like I am committed until I am into the painting.
So to take an everyday object and to put it into a setting and cropping a composition that makes it a symbol for something else is largely what the magic of still life is for me. There is a certain thing that happens like especially with the marionette pieces that unlike looking at another human being painted, where you are the observer. You become the marionette or the life mask.

You put yourself in reverse psychology, into that human, in that setting of the painting. At least that’s my interpretation of it and I think other people probably feel similarly. The painting is magic. And especially oil painting. I don’t like water color. It is not as forgiving. There is just something about me creating that three dimensional form with this medium on a stick. I am a fairly tight painter. I have control of the mud on my stick.