Meet Kim Rahal…

K: Actually I reside in Burlington. There’s nothing there for an artist, so my work is here. I’ve been in Wisconsin since ’95.

K: A friend of mine was looking for some photography classes and she found the gallery through the website. I had been telling her that I wanted to get back to showing my work, because it had been awhile. I mean, I had been selling my work on my own. I was a member of the Bayview Art Guild in Milwaukee for quite a while. And then I moved to Burlington. There was the Burlington Art Guild, or something of that nature, but it kind of fell apart. So there wasn’t really any place for me to have my work hanging… all of my sales were done word of mouth. I was looking to get back into the art community. So we came and checked it out [Lemon Street Gallery]. I met with Franco and Melanie and submitted some of my work for jurying and was accepted.

K: Yeah, it was probably in September.

K: Probably in 2009, because there are so many other members in front of me. In the first quarter that I put my work up, I sold one of my pieces right away.

K: Yeah. I don’t know if anything has sold this time around I haven’t had a chance to get over there. Actually I’m gonna go over and check out after this.

K: I don’t have anything there. I will at some point.

K: My whole life. When I was two I was handed some clay and the first art anything I did was a turkey. And it looked just like a turkey. They fired it for me and then I painted it all different colors. So it wasn’t your traditional looking turkey; all these multiple colors. Actually my mother kept it out on the table for Thanksgiving for years and years. I don’t know what happened to that turkey.

K: She probably does. Probably tucked away somewhere.

K: Wow. Um, most of my abstract work is an expression of an emotion. A lot of it comes from events that occur in my life. If I’m angry I’ll put it on the canvas. If I’m happy I’ll put it on the canvas. The difference, if you look at some of the pieces, like the large piece I had at LSG, I titled it Serene, it was all blues, greens and it had a little red, and that was I was just in a really serene, kind of mellow feeling and I expressed it. That painting over there [hanging at Common Grounds] is an explosion of energy and feeling and really, RARRRR!

K: RARRRR! R-A—-

K: Not really. I think where my training started was my mother, she’s an artist as well. She is so insecure she won’t show her work. She is so talented. She is an amazing artist. When I was an infant the way she entertain me was to put me in a playpen, give me my toys and juice and she would paint. I think a lot of the techniques and the style might have been something I sort of absorbed from watching her paint.
I’ve always had the inspiration to create art. I can’t remember a time that I didn’t have a pen, pencil, crayon, something in my hand doing something. Even at work, my desk planner has doodles all over it. People all the time are like, “What art are you creating now?” It’s just who I am.
I got married very young so I didn’t have an opportunity to go to college right away. When I was in my thirties, I wanted to go to school for art. It was something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always tried to go to that next level and perfect myself. At that point I was very uptight about perfectionism and realism, that’s where the portraiture and landscaping came from, because I was trying to create something that looked like something. I was almost trying to create that photographic painting. So when I went to college I went for art. It didn’t last very long because I was a single mom trying to raise a kid and I was working three jobs and it was insane. I encountered my first art teacher, his name was Tom Watts in Newport News, Virginia. He assaulted my ego on a daily basis. He saw my talent but he couldn’t stand the fact that I was so trying to be so perfect. One of the things in art is that it is not perfect. So he basically would come to a piece of mine and dip a brush into paint and [Kim makes a flicking motion] and walk away and it infuriated me. The thing he taught me was to make a mess and then create art out of it. He broke the mold of I have to be perfect. It actually took me to a whole other level as an artist.
I did a lot of self study as far as I would buy books on Van Gogh and I would look at Renoir and Monet and I would look at their work and try to figure out how did they do this?
I didn’t finish school, because I couldn’t afford it. So that was my limited exposure to classes. Then I met this guy that I got into a relationship with. Was with him for about four years. We’re still very close, good friends, because he’s a crazy artist as well. He’s quite talented, but at this point he’s not doing anything because he’s totally nuts. That’s really the best way to explain it. He’s very well known in Milwaukee. He was an abstract artist. When I met him I was trying to break out of realism and get into abstract art, but my abstract was very immature. I really didn’t know how to go about doing it.
Abstract work is not just throwing colors on a canvas. It’s very difficult, because you have to make it look like something. People look at it and say, Oh, anybody could do this. But where does that come from? Where do you come up with the concept to put the colors in that way? There’s so much to it.
So him being the abstract artist that he was, got me drunk one night, got this huge canvas and handed me my paintbrush and said, “We’re cranking up the tunes and we’re putting paint on this canvas.” I was very intimidated, because this was a big four feet by four feet piece. At first I was like, “I can’t do this.” Like you said, where does the inspiration come from? I got very frustrated and I started putting color on there and the next thing I knew I had this amazing piece of artwork. As time went on, he would do this with me and then he started showing me different techniques that go into an abstract. So I learned a lot from him in that regard and he helped me to express my emotion on canvas. Because prior to that my expressing my emotion would be doing a portrait of someone and it would be if I was sad it would be very dark, depressed kind of piece. Now when I do abstract I can put it in some form of art.

K: I think a lot of people get it. Maybe not exactly what I was thinking, but I think maybe the feel of what was coming through me emotionally. I did a piece I called Corporate Rage. I was working with an organization for a very long time and it was changing and the people I had been working with for a many, many years were becoming competitive to keep their positions, because it was becoming very apparent that some of us were getting axed. So I had a high level of respect for these people in this organization and all of a sudden people started cutting throats and it got really nasty. Then they started attacking me. I came home one day and created this painting called Corporate Rage. I don’t know if anyone understands the title, because when you look at it, it doesn’t necessarily reflect corporate America and all that. It’s black, it’s got gold and some silver in it. Some white and it has red, some red dots. To me that was that they were squeezing me so tight that they’re making me bleed. And that anger was in there.

K: Yes. Because when I’m painting I’m actually letting that passion flow through me through the paintbrush and onto the canvas. When I express the emotion I allow that feeling to come through. It may be through the color that I pick.
Through my art I’ve learned to cope with my reality. You know, we have to live in the real world. If I had my choice I would do nothing but create art, but that’s not real in this world. Everything that I go through in life I tend to express in my work and it’s very therapeutic and healthy for me. You know rather than bottle those things up and walk around all, you know, upset or whatever, I’m able to get it out. And once I get it out I’m okay. It’s kind of like therapy.

K: That’s why I’m here. I see that it’s a growing artist community and Kenosha is embracing art, the arts. I feel that that’s wonderful, because in our schools art is being pushed aside, it’s almost as though the world we live in is taking something that is so important and so nurturing and valuable and something that withstands time, you know if we look back in history what do we look at? We look at art. All the way to Paleolithic times, we look at cave drawings and that’s how we know what’s going on in the community or whatever, the world. But for some reason in our world, maybe our lack of global consciousness, people have said this isn’t important because it isn’t something tangible that we can market. So there isn’t a venue that’s healthy for artists to be in. Through Lemon Street Gallery and my associations there and meeting Kate Fallucca, she introduced me to the Kenosha Art Association and I became aware of all the things that are going on here and this is really great. I am so happy to see the community embracing the arts. I’m really excited to be able to be a part of it.

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Kim Rahal you have been “exposed”

Kim has a show at the Pollard Gallery 3/1-5/2. The reception is March 7th and will be from 6-9pm. This is a shared show with Kate Fallucca.

Visit Kim’s myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/prosephene