Waterway I, 2012

Kim Uchiyama  

Kim Uchiyama is an American abstract artist whose work employs color, pattern, and texture to activate the metaphysical potential of pictorial space. She lives and works in New York.

Uchiyama studied art and literature at Drake University in Des Moines, IA, and art history in Florence, Italy. She has studied art at Yale’s Summer School of Art & Music, Queens College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Her fellowships include the New York Foundation For The Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Auvillar, France, and BAU Institute, Puglia, Italy.

Uchiyama works with watercolor on Arches paper and oil paints on canvas. She often develops as many as eight compositions at one time, moving on to the next while the paint dries on the last. To begin each work, she waits to “see” a hue on the blank surface. Each additional hue builds off of that original vision, building towards a linear horizontal pattern. Each layer possesses unique physical and material properties: some are opaque; others are translucent; some are painterly; others are flat. Uchiyama sometimes works “wet on wet,” applying fresh layers of paint while the previous layer is still wet. This technique results in different color relationships and pictorial elements than when painting wet on dry. Each choice she makes is in service to the creation of a dynamic, multi-faceted composition that can pull the eye inward towards an experience of the unseen.

One of Uchiyama’s most influential inspirations was her teacher, the painter Nicolas Carone, who himself had studied with Hans Hofmann. Uchiyama shares the sensitivity Carone and Hofmann developed towards the importance of color, space, and structure. She mobilizes these elements in her compositions to create tension, harmony, and rhythm. Uchiyama is frequently inspired by the light or atmosphere of a particular location, or a particular landscape, that she encounters in real life. She strives to communicate some aspect of the essence or feeling of that place—its light, shadow, mood, color, tone, texture, or atmosphere—in her work.

Uchiyama has exhibited her work extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work has been reviewed in ARTNews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times, among others.