“Before I found art, I had no sense of the future. I could have ended up in a dead-end job or even jail, not because I was violent but because I was thoughtless. Then I found this. It is all I wanted.” – Kim Dorland
This Friday we introduced our senior class at KCS to the contemporary Canadian painter Kim Dorland. We were inspired by his painting, After the Party.
Kim Dorland was born in 1974 in Wainright, Alberta. He lives and creates his art in Toronto. In 1998 he earned his BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and in 2003 he earned his MFA from York University in Toronto.
His interest in art came early in his teens and was quite fascinated with the work of the Group of Seven. He was inspired by the work of Canadian painter, Tom Thomson and one of his sons is named after him.
Dorland’s work uses an impasto style of thick layers of acrylic paint on canvas and fluorescent hues and brushwork that incorporates glass, glitter, glue, feathers and wood.
He spent five months at the McMichael Gallery in 2013 completing a residency to create a body of paintings that were inspired by the galleries collection. What emerged was a fresh take on what it means to be a distinctly Canadian painter.
Dorland prefers to paint on large canvasses, “You don’t see many huge, aggressive, big paintings in Canada,” he says. It has become a part of his signature style.
n 2005, Dorland created The Loner, a portrait of a kid in a heavy metal T-shirt standing behind a tree in an infinite landscape. It was after creating this that he realised that he wanted to tell his own story.
Private and public institutions internationally collect his work including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Berlin’s Sander Collection, Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal and many others