Kimberley Day
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AQ Volume V artist Kimberley Day works as a Concept Artist on award-winning films, a career spanning the past 20 years, as well as a successful international-selling artist known for her abstracted landscapes, working across a range of mediums. She has exhibited in Paris, London, and all over the UK.
Kimberley received a Bachelor's in Fine Art from Plymouth University and a Master's from the Royal College of Art. She is predominantly interested in exploring the crossover between the felt landscape and the literal places she locally explores. Chiefly expressed through mark making, colour play, and composition, Kimberley is influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Secessionist, Edo Period art, Symbolic and Magical Realism. She is always moving toward fully realizing that intangible space between observer and observed.
She has exhibited at The Green & Stone Gallery and The Other Art Fair in London, Otter Gallery in Dorset, Spacex Gallery in Exeter, alongside solo exhibitions and more around the UK.
Kimberley has been interviewed and featured in publications and online internationally, including Behind the Artist, Wacom, and Perspective magazine, among others. She has multiple publications showcasing her work.
She works from her garden studio on the Jurassic coast on the south coast of England.
www.dayfineart.com
What inspired you to become an artist?
The act of making art has been a constant throughout my life, more compulsion than choice. I can't remember a time when I wasn't crafting or drawing and painting. After leaving school, I felt compelled to get an education that would allow me to continue this throughout my career. It has been a leading force that has transformed my life, allowing me to work on films such as Star Wars and The Matrix and, in the last few years, return to my first love of painting.
Can you describe the ideas or themes behind your most recent work?
My more recent paintings are a love letter to the beautiful area that I live. I like to think of the countryside as a place that people find solace and feel grounded, but it can also elicit fear and force us to wrestle with our own relatively short existence compared to that of the nature that will continue its beautiful cycle beyond us. Currently, I'm interested in reflections, both literally and metaphorically—how they distort what we perceive as real. Just as our memory and feelings can distort our own lived experience.
What has been the most challenging part of your artistic journey?
I think the most challenging part of my artistic journey is time—never feeling I have quite enough of it. I try to fill every moment that I have available to me, making the most of my time as I juggle both my film career and painting. I do so happily, but sometimes to my own detriment. I look forward to finding a balance between both and would love to eventually commit fully to my painting.
What role does experimentation or exploration play in your creative process?
One of the most joyful parts of painting for me is learning to use different mediums together, mark making, and fully realizing the potential of each medium within one painting. It has led to some painting disasters but also delightful surprises that I have been able to move forward with and that keeps me on my toes.
What rituals or practices help guide your work?
When I start on a new piece of work, I will initially work from sketches and reference photos, but this is only a very small part of my practice. As soon as I start painting in earnest, I forget about them and then I'm just on this journey with the paint and colour, wrestling to find some balance and truth in what I'm trying to describe.
What do you hope people will take away from your work?
I hope that in some small way my work will talk to some people, that I will be able to communicate with the viewer something unseen or unsayable, and for a moment we will be sharing an understanding of what it means to be fallible and human and capable of sharing this together.
Do you have a personal mantra or philosophy that guides you, both in art and life?
If there was one truth that I have personally lived and found liberating, but also an antidote to anxiety, it is this: "As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him." When I have found myself really stuck in life, I have realized that my thoughts about it were as harmful as any outside influence. It's helpful to realize that you have agency even when you think you don't, just as much through thought as through action.
