Kim Ouellette: Emerald Tears
Kim Ouellette’s abstract paintings are in constant, fluid motion. Working in acrylic and sumi ink on raw canvas, she moves between heavily impastoed passages and thin, stained areas where the canvas shows through soft and nearly weightless. A consistent vocabulary of interlocking shapes, drawn and brushed line, dense fields of small marks, and saturated color set against quiet ground carries through the work, but she recomposes it with each phase. Paintings once pieced together from flat planes of color and finely hatched line now build all-over fields of dabbed and layered paint or open into broad, gestural expanses. The shifts come swiftly, one body of work flowing into the next.
Her process is improvisational and psychological, a continuous conversation with uncertainty between the artist and the space of the painting. She chooses risk over the comfort of what she already knows how to do, and she is drawn to the moment a painting reaches a point of no return, when its elements begin to feel necessary even if she can’t fully explain why. That rightness is discovered rather than planned. She often finds it by stopping, sitting with the work, and looking away, letting a side glance show her where to move next. Recent paintings have grown to a much larger scale, with larger brushes and looser passages set against areas of greater weight and density.
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Ouellette has lived and worked in Atlanta since 2004. Her work has been collected and exhibited in Canada, Scotland, and the U.S. since 1985, including the group exhibitions Gathered V (2022) and Gathered IV (2019) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia.
