Back in 2010 I gave my second ever presentation as an artist-speaker, called Daily Practices for Artists, looking at the tremendous value they have for our creativity and our “real” work, the forms they can take, how to figure out one that is both appealing and suits your circumstances.

So recently I decided to take my own advice (haha)... again.

I revived an old, not-quite-daily practice from 2009, my Colour Diary. Over the course of ~100 installments, I mixed and painted maybe 1,000 or more colours, into stripes of various widths. 

The original project evolved over time, and ultimately changed me. I never looked at colour the same way again. I was never as limited in my colour thinking (or colour experience) as I was before the Colour Diary.

Each page was improvised. I would begin with a starting point – one day it was the colour of the peanut butter I’d looked at over breakfast – and then respond. 

They also became composed paintings in that I would not work left to right, I would decide on a position and width (they were always vertical stripes on a horizontal piece of water-colour paper, of identical size each time), and both respond to the colours already mixed and applied and to the relative sizes and positions.

Occasionally I would play specific formal colour games, whether out of curiosity or because I didn’t feel inventive enough that day.​

Coming back to the New Colour Diary (or Covid Colour Diary), it was an appealing idea to return to it, to play almost entirely with colour again.

Life has been very demanding, between the pandemic situation, the resulting overhaul of our (my husband’s and my) business(es), family medical crises, personal health issues and on and on.

All of that has made time for studio practice difficult and irregular, but it is essential to my well-being, never mind my professional practice! A bite-sized daily practice is exactly what circumstances demanded.

My first change to the original project was to make it digital, so it would be a manageable time commitment for me. Then as soon as I thought that, I knew I wanted to give it a dedicated Instagram account, to share it with the world, or at least that tiny part of the world that either knows or stumbles across me.

So that is where you will find me, posting these little colour meditations, every day whenever possible. My first goal is 100 days, as in #100daysofcolour, and then we’ll see after that.

You can visit it here (even without an Instagram account): 
​https://www.instagram.com/kims.colour.diary/
​Just click on an image to see it larger.

If you have any trouble viewing it there, I have a Flickr album as well, though I do not update it daily:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmR7BVqf

I hope you will check it out, and that you’ll enjoy it!

Part two of this blog series is up!
​To go directly to it, click here.

The 2018 In Situ multi-arts festival took place November 8–10 at the Small Arms Inspection Building (a former WWII munitions factory now partially refurbished as a creative hub) in Mississauga, Ontario.

'Hearts in Place' was a whole-room installation comprised of: ten 7-foot high scrolls, eight of which were transfer-printed (a hand-pulled process), two were hand-painted; two paper-and-fibre "veined" panels (centre); two veiling textile panels; one built-onsite sculpture/assemblage which you can see a sliver of light from at the centre of this photo; and the wall behind me as I photographed the room panorama was a mural drawing which I drew a portion of as a live performance each of the three evenings of the festival.

Like the first In Situ festival in 2016, this was an extraordinary experience and a creative high, but with the benefit of central heating and running water!

I am still exhausted from the experience of preparing all of this new work, performing and then taking it all down just days later. As a result I will keep this entry shorter than I might have, but will share with you some photographs. Thanks go to the numerous – generous – photographers and friends, (all credited individually), who made this possible, documenting when I could not.

​Many thanks to the many people who came out to experience the festival and visited my room! If you were there, please let me know what you thought in the comments below.

Hope you had a great holiday weekend (if you're in North America at least).

​I'm currently buried deep in preparations for the Acrylics: Explore, Express & Experiment course I teach every summer in Haliburton. So much still to do, not enough time to write a proper post, but I thought I would share a sample panel-in-progress with you (pictured above).

​I will update this post with the finished result... after the pour! Should be fun, fingers crossed :-)

So often I notice something but don't record it. At home the other day though I did manage to photograph something that caught my eye.

Light and shadow; transparency, colour; shape and form; what more do we need for a bit of everyday beauty?

In response to a 7-day nature photography challenge on Facebook, I've been layering up and altering some photographs (couldn't stick with straightforwardly produced ones for long!) and thought I'd share them with you on the blog.

Left: Royal Tree 2, shot in England last month.
Right: Nature Through a Fence, based on ivy I shot this fall, layered with a close-up of my Insubstantiated drawing/sculpture/installation as well as a detail from a painting of mine.

There is a lot of beauty when you can see the details – just click on the images to see them larger. Do you find these interesting? If so please let me know in the comments :-)

Here is a detail from my new painting "Hearts are Wild" now showing in 'RED' an exhibition which opened yesterday (Saturday January 30) at Renann Isaacs Contemporary Art in Guelph, Ontario. 

'RED' is a group show of square-foot paintings by 50+ artists, all united by the colour red. 

Among the group are artists I know and admire such as Kal Honey, Cole Swanson and Seth as well as luminary Ron Shuebrook, so I'm in excellent company! 

If circumstances weren't preventing me, I would be working on more paintings in this vein (so to speak). I'll just have to figure out how I can keep thinking along these lines but in my sketchbook instead until I can get back into my studio.

If you have a chance to visit the show, please let me know what you think, whether in the comments below or via the contact form or on social media. It's worth the drive to Guelph!

This little painting is fresh off the... well, it wasn't painted on an easel, so I guess I have to say table. 

I'm too tired to be able to say much about it beyond what's in the caption, but it relates to my abiding interests in shape, colour relationships, layering and paint application.

I'd like to do more using the same process (one I've only dabbled in before), so we'll see what the schedule will allow. Hope you enjoy it :-)

L to R, top to bottom: Around Again #1; Summer Spin; Broken Through; Radiant Salsa; Tempest; Magic Hour. Paintings by Kim Lee Kho.

Happy New Year!

To start 2016 off right, I thought I'd share these paintings they are in the faculty show at Neilson Park Creative Centre, in Etobicoke (Toronto), which runs today to Jan 31.

I've asked the centre to hang them in pairs as you see here, except for one painting (not shown here) that will hang solo.

If you click on any of these images you will be taken to a larger view of it on my Flickr page, where you can also see some nice close-up details.

All of these are small, 12" x 12", canvases or wood panels.

I use this size as a kind of painting journal, where I try things out, have painterly thoughts, make discoveries.

One of the newer (for me) ingredients I worked with in three of these was fluorescent colour. I've also scraped, scratched, masked, texturized, crackled, dry brushed, glazed and impastoed (though that's not really a word, is it?).

I hope you'll have a chance to visit these paintings in person.