Kim Blenkhorn - Fine Art and Drawing

In the September 2020 installment of The Artist Spotlight, we put the spotlight on portrait artist Kim Blenkhorn!  Kim is a self-taught artist working in many mediums.  Her favorites are watercolor, acrylic, and graphite.  In addition to producing her remarkable artwork, she has been teaching art for many years.

Tell us about your art! 

My art of choice is pencil work. I use graphite pencils to draw on a variety of paper including watercolor, gray toned, tan toned, and smooth white. I also use a variety of graphite pencils from hard to soft and dark. Black and white portraits are my areas of expertise working from reference photos and often images I gather from the internet.  I draw daily and it takes me about a week to finish a portrait. I like natural lighting, even when the lighting is later in the day. I find that the more I study my subjects the better and more detailed my pictures are. I also tend to draw what I see, not what I know or think. A mouth is not a mouth; it is a shape, a line, a shadow. Proportions matter a great deal and I use my eraser a lot. I would love to find a way to make my art into a business.

What inspires you? 

I am inspired by people who, in my opinion, have a respectable reason to be remembered. They have overcome a great difficulty in life. They have accomplished something unique.  They have had a great faith in the face of fear.  They have displayed bravery.  In essence, they have done something unique and changed the course of history and oftentimes their struggles have been personal and their journey against all odds in some way resonates with my own journey. It is men and women and children who have, without the approval or regard or support of peers, done something of grand proportions. 

I draw people whom I admire - authors, such as J.R.R Tolkien, Malcom Gladwell or Maya Angelou, artists such as Norman Rockwell or Grandma Moses, geniuses such as Einstein and hard workers like Tom Brady. I have drawn presidents who had to make hard decisions, leaders who have struggled with depression like Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln and prisoners like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Nelson Mandela, as well as missionaries who have traveled across the world and risked their lives to tell people about God and help feed the hungry. I write about the people I draw too. 

Sometimes a group moves me - oppressed peoples, or minority populations. This past year, I drew Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks after the George Floyd incident. I am moved by social injustice. I have drawn people of faith who stepped out to do something sacrificial such as Corrie Ten Boom. I am drawn very much to portraits of people and they are the lives they live that is what inspires my greatest art pieces.