​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Kim DiDonato Art

Artist Statement



The thrill of creating art never wavers. I’m primarily an abstract painter working in acrylic on canvas and panel but increasingly I’ve been sculpting in clay, particularly as a way of expressing the figure. I love the process of developing narrative ideas which can be triggered through a wide range of sources: a life drawing session, a hike on a mountain trail, or the energy from a great piece of music. I’ll work through my ideas by experimenting with mixing color, developing and refining shapes and building up textured grounds. In my latest series, A Milked Horizon, which was inspired by travels through New Mexico, I used a layering process of paint, grit and paper to capture the intense colors, textures and shapes in these powerful desert landscapes.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the shadow realm between painting and sculpture which developed into a body of work exhibited in Key West, Florida. Together|Alone was a response to the covid pandemic when all of life seemed to have moved to the virtual world. Like many people, I found this depressing and wanted to convey a widespread feeling of social isolation through a series of distorted and fractured figures. The influence of Giacometti can perhaps be seen. In the paintings the figures are grouped facing forward, seemingly together, but in fact isolated from one another as if engaged with a viewer we cannot see. In the sculptures the isolation is complete. The figures stand alone on their shadow box with only faint shadows behind them.