Kim VanDerHoek | Elevated Perspectives

Paintings by Kim VanDerHoek offer fresh views of the natural and human-made worlds

By Norman Kolpas

Kim VanDerHoek vividly remembers the moments when inspiration first struck for the dramatic new direction she’s been exploring recently in her cityscapes and landscapes. It was mid-July of 2018, and she had traveled by air from her home in Southern California to Washington, DC, and then driven to coastal Maryland to participate in Plein Air Easton, the nation’s largest outdoor painting competition. Just over a week later, she flew to Milwaukee and drove a couple of hours north to Door County for its weeklong plein-air festival focusing on the pastoral beauty of that slender peninsula on Lake Michigan’s western shore.

The first flash of inspiration had come as her plane descended over the nation’s capital. “Out the window, I saw the Washington Monument, backlit and blurry,” she says. “And I wanted to see if I could capture the beauty of that moment in a painting.” Then, while taking off from Milwaukee on her way home to California, a different sort of scene called to her from above the clouds: endless farmland crisscrossed by traceries of country roads and interstate highways. “I shot reference photos out the window, as I had of DC. And this time I wondered, why don’t I try to reference the entirety of the trip in a painting?”

Her Washington photos evolved into a series featuring familiar sites, like the white granite obelisk that first captured her imagination along with the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the White House, the Capitol, the Potomac River, and more—all of them presented with an element of pleasing abstraction that naturally results when familiar things are viewed through atmosphere from afar. The images she shot over the Midwest, meanwhile, transformed into semi-abstracted composites, paintings all the more iconic for their lack of specific landmarks and their dreamlike qualities.

Not surprisingly, VanDerHoek’s work has received significant praise of late, including being selected as a finalist in numerous salons, festivals, and competitions. Last year she was recognized for distinguished achievement in landscape, seascape, or cityscape by the American Women Artists in a show that—considering the predominant viewpoint in so many of her works—was most appropriately entitled Lifting the Sky.

VanDerHoek’s earliest dreams of a life in art quite literally began in a lofty location: the Southern California town of Big Bear Lake, located at an elevation of 6,752 feet in the San Bernardino Mountains not quite a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. “Some of my earliest memories,” she says, “are of the time I spent with my mom, sitting at the dining room table doing crafts together.” At the age of 7 she won a poster contest in her elementary school, and she continued to excel in art classes after her family moved “off the mountain,” first to the apple-growing region of Yucaipa and then to Pasadena, where she finished high school.

Another influence she remembers with clarity is the work of Southern California artist Joshua Meador, a close friend of her grandparents, who worked full time at Disney as an animator on such classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Bambi, and Peter Pan, and as a special-effects artist for live-action films including Forbidden Planet and The Absent-Minded Professor. “My grandparents owned a number of his paintings,” VanDerHoek recalls. “So I actually got to spend time with his work and grew up with a love of the way it combines realism and abstraction. That had a huge impact on what I gravitate toward as an artist myself.”

Wanting to pursue her love of art while also gaining skills her family deemed more practical, she began studying graphic design and graduated in 1993 with a degree in illustration from Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, later renamed the California College of the Arts. That led her to work for about 12 years as a graphic designer, first in the San Francisco Bay area and later back in Southern California. That’s where she met and, almost 18 years ago, married architect Carl VanDerHoek. For as long as they’d known each other, she had spoken to him about how much she would love to paint someday. So, for Christmas in 2005, while the oldest of their two children was still an infant, “He bought me an easel for Christmas and said, ‘Maybe it’s time to start painting.’”

VanDerHoek’s first effort, she admits with a laugh, “was horrible.” Fortunately, having mastered related skills in college, she knew just what she needed: “a skill set, a foundation. So I started looking for painting classes.” That led her to the thriving plein-air scene in Orange County, where she took weekly classes and gradually developed her talents. Within a couple of years, she began selling her work online, “which helped me pay for art supplies and was encouraging enough for me to continue.”

Among the artists whose instruction and support helped spur her on was the award-winning painter and teacher Greg LaRock, who tragically died a year and a half ago at the age of 55 after falling and hitting his head while rollerblading with his wife. “I took a number of his workshops,” VanDerHoek says. “For many years, he was a huge cheerleader for me, sort of an unofficial mentor, and eventually a friend. Every time I paint, I use techniques that I learned from Greg. And without him, I would never have started applying to plein-air events.” But apply she did. Soon she was adding impressive shows to her resume: Sonoma Plein Air for the first time in 2011, Laguna Plein Air in 2012, Easton in 2013, and continually onward and upward through the years.

VanDerHoek’s more recent elevated approach to her subject matter lends itself not only to tranquil landscapes and bustling cities but also to what some viewers might consider a more dystopian side of urban development. Her painting TYING THE KNOT, for example, presents a scene of warehouses, factories, a tangle of freeways, and a concrete-confined river just east of downtown Los Angeles. Yet in its composition, color, and paint application, it transforms what could be considered blight into an energetic, moody abstract piece.

To create this painting, she worked from a photo she had taken and displayed on her iPad. She “set a darker mood,” she says, by first applying an underpainting of warm yellow to the lower portion and a cooler yellow to the upper part of a sealed birch panel. She then “sculpted” the scene mostly in violets and purples, scraping the rectangular forms of low buildings with a rubber-tipped color scraper, using other tools to lift off paint to delineate freeway lanes and interchanges, adding tiny dots to suggest automobiles, and even taking a roller across certain areas like the upper corners “to rake up specific details, creating more of an impression of movement, memory, and a dreamlike quality.”

Through such deft manipulation of paint—sometimes intentional, sometimes instinctive—her ultimate aim is to engage her audience. “There comes a point for me personally,” she notes, “when too much detail can kill the life in the painting. Then there’s no mystery, nothing for the viewers to solve, no door through which they can interact with the work and interject their own interpretations and experiences.”

Lately VanDerHoek has been experimenting with bringing the same level of abstraction she’s developed in her bird’s-eye views to ground-based perspectives as well. OBSCURITY, painted during last summer’s Plein Air Easton, presents a view across a river full of ominous clouds and dark shadows. She notes, however, that the day was actually sunny, the foliage green. Her darker palette deliberately reflected her feelings during the first time she attended the event since mentor Greg LaRock’s passing. “An important part of what we do as artists,” she explains, “is to filter our experience and emotions into whatever subject we’re painting.”

In the future VanDerHoek looks forward to exploring abstraction even more, without ever completely losing touch with her real-world subjects. “I’d like to push it in the direction of a lot more experimentation, and also seeing if it’s possible to go a lot more sculptural with oils,” she says. “But I don’t know if I’d ever go fully abstract.”

She does, however, definitely dream of painting on an ever-larger scale; size alone may push her subjects even more in the direction of abstraction. “I’d love to do a monumental-size painting, or a series of them,” she says. That thought, on its own, sends a thrill through someone who dreamed of being an artist since childhood. “Oh, my gosh!” she continues. “Wouldn’t it be so exciting to try something that’s 30 feet long?”

representation
Chemers Gallery, Tustin, CA; Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA, and Charleston, SC; www.americancontemporary.art; www.kimvanderhoek.com.

This story appeared in the April/May 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.