By Ellison Walcott
One thing is for sure: painter Kimberly Dawn knows how to vogue. She stared into the Downtown Express photographer’s camera lens as if posing for a Calvin Klein ad. Her porcelain white Persian cat Princess Isabella, a.k.a. P dog, sat in the corner of her studio beaming with pride, as if she was the one who taught Dawn the sultry poses.
Dawn’s instinct to flirt with the camera alludes to the duality that is her life. Her world is made up of little compartments that, unlike the colors in her paintings, aren’t meshed. Every morning Dawn trots off to the financial industry to crunch numbers with other financiers. “They don’t know that I paint,” said Dawn, who has worked on Wall St. for seven years. “I feel like they barely know me.”
In the one-bedroom apartment on the Hudson River in Battery Park City, some 50 paintings of varying colors and sizes leaned against the walls, the chairs and a couch. The furniture all but disappeared into color fields of oil. “I can’t stop painting,” said Dawn who picked up the brush two and a half years ago.
One night while she and a colleague were hanging out at work waiting for a fax from their boss, they started musing about what they would do if they didn’t spend long hours at their jobs. “It started as a fluke,” she said. “I used to be in investment banking. I hated it. I felt like it was what I had to do, because it was what all my friends were doing and what I went to college for. You’re young and the hours are crazy, but you do it even though it’s crazy because they’re always threatening your job.
“I told my co-worker that I’d love to create and just play with color,” Dawn said. As the hours passed and 2 a.m. rolled around and still no fax arrived, she began using PowerPoint to create her first work of art. “After that night, I was thinking I could have a hobby. So, one day I went and bought a canvas and I just went home and I painted it,” she laughed, then repeated again, “I can’t stop painting. I love it.”
Her first opus was titled: “Sideshow by the Seashore.” “I sold the painting three days later on Ebay,” she said. Since the initial sale on Ebay, Dawn has sold over 100 paintings on the Web site and to private clients.
Now Dawn wakes up at 5:30 every morning to paint before she heads into the world of numbers. “At work I’ll be thinking about the compositions of my paintings while I’m dealing with spreadsheets,” Dawn said. “I enjoy finance but I’m passionate about painting.”
From Dallas, Texas, Dawn, 28, grew up wanting to work on Wall St., definitely not the vision most little girls have in mind. Obviously Dawn was not like most little girls. Now, she feels somewhat like an outsider in her corporate pursuits. “I had expectations of myself,” she said. “My heart was set on going to Wall St. Living in Dallas I kind of felt like I was living on an island and there was a whole world out there for me to see.” Dawn paused for a moment then spoke again, “I thought New York was where I could go, and get into finance and my life would be perfect.”
Dawn’s ability to focus on numbers all day long has served her well. No doubt her capacity to paint continually for 10 hours began with her initial training in the financial world.
“For the past seven years I’ve worked in finance and it’s very tedious, but you have to be in control of your mind nonstop. It’s very detailed. I think my finance career has trained me to kind of just keep going,” she said.
Dawn has had no art school training. Yet, her control of the brush and paint are rare for any painter, let alone someone who has only been painting for such a short time. While the artworks are abstract they do, nonetheless, have a narrative quality to them. In “The Mean Green,” 2003, Dawn has brushed on a mixture of bands of various shades of yellows, blues and greens, applying the colors in layers. This particular blend of under and over painting summons a land and seascape, similar to Alex Katz’s piece in Wall Street Rising’s Art Downtown, an exhibition in which Dawn participated.
However, she greatly admires Rothko and his influence is highly apparent in her work. Like Rothko, she often paints large rectangles of color to evoke transcendent emotional states. Rothko began painting in the 1930s in a climate of anxiety. Dawn, too, seems to be affected by the angst that looms from the current world situation.
The work offers an abstraction of the human emotions; they have both a tension and a harmony resembling a divided self.
Unlike Rothko, she has surrendered to a natural harmony of tones, however existential, the paintings resonate with bands and rectangles of color, shape, balance, depth, and an intentionally or instinctive defined composition.
Dawn has also given texture to some of her paintings, a further suggestion of her command of the paint and brush. Palette knives are wielded for texture. At once, the paintings are thick and impasto-like, as in “Le Feu Des Roses.” Then, in “Shades of Hope,” 2001 the paint is flat to the surface, barely depictable as oil.
Dawn chooses to paint mostly in reds these days. While the work is not in anyway illustrational of destruction and mayhem, one can only believe that this is the idea beneath the surface of the work.
Some artists need seclusion and others demand more of the world. Dawn certainly belongs to the latter group. This duality, between the creative and the concrete, between the gesture of a brushstroke and the grid of an Excel spreadsheet, allows Dawn to step in and out of roles, just by changing environments or her clothes.
Dawn will take part in the TOAST (Tribeca Open Artist Studio Tour) artwalk from Sat. April 26 through Mon., April 28, open from 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. each day at a studio at 67 Hudson St. You can preview Dawn’s and other artists’ works by going to www.toastartwalk.com.
