Kim Krause reworks his lyrical
abstractions until the surface contains
and reveals traces of
the artist’s process over time.

Time Turning

■ By Ruth K. Meyer

Kim Krause’s methods in the studio frighten other artists. At the end of a day’s work, he typically douses his meticulously painted linen canvas with paint thinner, erasing what he’d accomplished—but not entirely. With oil pigments loaded onto sable brushes, he achieves deeply saturated color so that even after the paint thinner bath, these colors remain as a ghostly underpainting that the artist returns to again and again in the course of finishing the work.

There’s nothing new here. Obliterating marks is a technique of the earliest oil painters who aimed to eliminate all traces of brushwork. At the end of the day, a painter’s work would be washed or scraped down; paint strokes that reared up from the surface would be

sanded away. Subsequent, successive applications of paint allowed a jewel-like depth to develop; as a result, individual objects, like those in a Flemish still life, would glow with an inner light that scholars compared to the light of God.

In addition to pouring solvent on the canvas, Krause also scrapes layers of paint away. He “scrapes the painting down” with plastic, disposable drywall taping knives (in varying sizes; Krause has about eight) whose corners he’s altered by rounding them with sandpaper. When he applies a glaze, it’s a simple one: alkyd painting medium whose transparency is affected by the amount of medium and the pigment quality of the paint.

Private collection

■ Ruth K. Meyer is an art historian and writer on the arts who lives on the banks of the Ohio River.

November 2008 ■ www.artistsmagazine.com