paper on kim dorland

Britney Boswell

Kim Dorland

Tonight I attended the lecture by Kim Dorland. His work was full of color and I wasn't expecting it. His work almost looked like digital work to me. He took a lot of his inspiration from Canadian works and canadian landscapes. 

He started off his career telling specific stories from his personal life. He was raised way out in the middle of now where, like me, so I could relate to a lot of the things his work was about. In many of his first works he included trailers, old trucks, hangout spots for teenagers and stories that he had heard growing up. That was very interesting to me. Probably one of my favorite paintings by him wash a painting done after a hunter story he heard. The story goes, that one day there were two hunters that had argued over who had shot this one deer. The man that won the argument, late that night was drug back to the woods and killed by the other hunter. Dorland portrayed the ominous of this painting perfectly! 

As time passes he began using more and more paint and started to focus on making more portraits of his wife, and son. A lot of people in New York said that he was just portraying his wife as an object, and for the world to see. In one they said that it looked as though he was spilling out her guts all over the room. Kim made sure to clarify that he loves his wife more than anything and that is not what he wanted to come across.

Later he moved on to paint wood scenes. One of the biggest ones that he painted was eight ft. by twelve ft. There is also a video on youtube showing how he made a painting. Another very interesting painting he makes of the woods was made of graffiti. He wasn't very good at graffiti, so he hired two men to help him with the graffiti part. He then says, "my wife said all I need to do now is add a dumb deer, so I did."

To keep from becoming a sculpturer, he would buy these stuffed animals, like a deer head, moose head, and most interesting, a timber wolf. He covered these animals in graffiti art and different neon colors so that people would pay more attention to the paint and not the statue. After that he began to work with glow in the dark materials. 

Finally the last few he has worked on he put in his last exhibit. It was all about light and how the light surrounds the painting. He found out that you don't have to use more paint to make the area lighter, but thinner paint. After that he just went crazy. he made a dozen more paintings where the sun shine beamed through. He also experimented with all of the different ways to portray light. He found that it could be really soft or really sharp. It could be thick, or transparent. 

All together, I would say that Kim gave a very good lecture. He could have been a little more energetic, but other than that, his work was energetic for him.