Kiseob Kim – Anniversary Art Exhibition

• Artist Portfolio Magazine
• Kiseob Kim – Brooklyn, NY

I was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1983. Drawing was the love of my life ever since I was very little. Although I wanted to become an artist in my youth, my parents were strongly against it. My parents wanted me to be a businessman, And I decided to come to the United States at the age of 24; my major was Resort Management when I first enrolled in a small college in Wisconsin. But when I looked at Rubens painting, ‘The Elevating of the Cross’ in an art history book, it changed my life. Immediately I started drawing the painting in my notebook, and when I finished drawing it, I realized that this is what I wanted to do. So I changed my major to Studio Art without speaking to my parents. I firstly applied to graduate school after I graduated, but I was rejected from every school I applied to. I relocated to Chicago to study at SAIC as a second degree student and applied to graduate school again at the end of the year. But I failed to get into graduate school again and returned to Korea. In Korea, I prepared one last time for graduate school, and finally I was accepted into Pratt Institute in 2013. Now, I keep painting in New York with F-1 OPT visa after I graduated Pratt Institute.

Artist Statement
Nature is the source of inspiration for me. Whenever I am lost, I always take a stroll outside, and it’s always only a matter of time before nature yields the answer to my troubles. The nature depicted in my work is its image as viewed in my mind, and “Nature” that answers back as I walk within it. It’s why I’m interested in landscapes and my expressions through them, and choose to focus on this theme.
I paint internal landscape to create my own vision of nature based on the feelings I have always had about nature. At any moment, nature may be cold and forbidding, warm and all-encompassing, beautiful and sunny, or dark and grim – that is its image in my works. Also, when I painted these paintings, I focused on color transition with a variety of color to bring out the emotions that color has. There are many elements in paintings that give us a powerful impression, and to me, color is the most important aspect of art; it is above all other things.