Kim VanDerHoek, They Made Maps of the Sky, oil, 40 x 30.
A few years ago, while seated on a plane taking off from the Milwaukee airport, Kim VanDerHoek felt compelled to snap some photographs of the sweeping scene outside her window. One picture displayed a few fleecy clouds drifting by; the second shot surveyed patches of green farmland below; and the third captured roads swerving through the landscape. VanDerHoek set those photos aside for many months before she returned to them as reference for her winning entry. “When I gather references, sometimes I’ll want to paint one, but I’m not sure of the approach I want to use,” she says, “so I’ll sit with it for a while.”
THEY MADE MAPS OF THE SKY—one in a series of aerial works the artist recently exhibited in a show at Principle Gallery in Virginia—was completed in VanDerHoek’s California studio. But she credits her experience painting en plein air for being able to pull the scene off successfully. Without her plein-air training, she says, “I couldn’t do the atmospheric effects as well, or understand how light moves across three-dimensional objects.”
VanDerHoek earned a degree in illustration and worked as a graphic designer for a decade before transitioning to a full-time fine-art career. Whether working on location or in her studio, she enjoys exploring a variety of painterly techniques that make each new work fresh and unique. Generally, though, her process begins with an underpainting and then the subtraction of paint, notes the artist, and she works with both brushes and palette knives, applying her paint in thick and thin layers. Adds VanDerHoek, “I’m trying to combine traditional elements of painting with a contemporary approach, marrying the two.”
Find the artist’s work at Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA, and Chemers Gallery, Tustin, CA.
This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.