ABOUT K RATTRAY

KIM RATTRAY IS A TORONTO-BASED ARTIST WHO USES WATERCOLOUR AND PEN AND INK TO CREATE PIECES OF FINE ART.

Born in Toronto, Kim`s roots are in two distinct places: the city and the country, where her family has a cottage near the southern edge of Algonquin Park.

Kim is always striving for clarity in her art. She believes meaning lies in the space between black and white, colour and form. Her work always starts from the colours she sees around her; form comes later on, often a little reluctantly. That said, she has a great love for the line – hence her use of pen and ink – but is wary of it taking over. She thinks colours involve less ego. Frequently, she allows both ink and paint to make their own path on the paper, exhilarated by the randomness and also the tension between found and made art.

A friend, Jean Salzmann, rekindled her love of painting in the early 2000’s. He was a German watercolourist and expressionist. They shared a love of nature, particularly the Algonquin Park region. Many of her paintings explore a complicated relationship between nature and art, in which the artist alternately tries to overcome her separateness from nature and distorts/destroys nature for her own purposes.

A habitual experimenter, Kim has chosen to embrace the watercolour medium, partially because it’s not embraced by most other post-modernists and she’s a stubborn iconoclast, but also because of its unpredictability and freshness. She feels that the medium is not done yet and still has the potential to create objects of power and meaning.  She explores its potential by pushing both the colours and viscosity. In some cases, that means making minimal use of it.

Kim produces both smaller and larger pieces. (Generally, the largest are 3’ x 3’ and the smaller are a standard watercolour size of 12” x 16” or 14” x 20”). The process of producing them is very different: the smaller ones are a spontaneous expression of the artist’s ‘beingness’ in the world, while the larger ones are each put together like a jigsaw puzzle that both signifies external objects and also is itself a stand-alone object. The former requires intensity and the latter stamina. All her paintings, even the abstract ones, are based on what she sees.

Kim still hopes art can save the world or, maybe, just change one person’s mind.