early spring (on white); editioned print

Early Spring (on White). Kim West. 2021

15"x22.5" image size. 17"x24.5" paper size, including 1" surrounding white border.

Archival Digital Print on 100% cotton Museum Etching paper. 

First Edition of 50. Hand signed and numbered by the artist.

Painted in Los Angeles, Printed in Los Angeles. 

When untrimmed, the rubber tree in the front yard can look like a seventy foot tall piece of broccoli. The deep to dappled shade it scatters creates micro-climates below that somehow thrive with little to no added water. Joseph's Coat roses start out sunshine-y and egg yolk-y, with a slivered rim of hot pink, eventually all deepening to electric carmine. Lady Banks roses – these, almost without thorns, bloom mini bouquets of dainty butter yellow only once a year. A few types of Bougainvillea, mallows, ferns, geraniums, salvias and lavenders, jades, zinnias, aloes, birds of paradise, nasturtium, and poppies. The poppies I started with seeds picked up absent mindedly at hardware stores, and over the years have added varieties from local garden nurseries and the gift shop at Giverny. Tossed by handfuls before it rains in the winter, come springtime, fluttery and crinkly varieties float above a velvety orange carpet of California's state flower.  After the petals have fallen, when it becomes hot and impossibly dry, I snap the dried center pods off their stems and save the seeds for sowing the next year.

From my series #NecessaryAdjacents  

From Spring 2019 through 2022, I was working on two large-scale/environmentally scoped mural projects that, at times, required exacting, tedious and slow studio processes. Though that type of work is often meditative and satisfying, at times it could also feel tight. To counter, I began to make loose and quick paintings inspired by whatever was blooming on my daily commutes through the yard and garden from house to backyard studio. I was thinking of this work as literally 'adjacent' because they were painted next to, and just out of frame from, my mural project work. At the beginning,  I was also thinking about the LACMA's installation of 'Raushcenberg: 1/4 mile', and time spent in a previous summer at Monet's Giverny. Also during this time (from 2020 onwards), anxieties over ever-divisive political landscapes, social injustices and heartbreaks, the ramifications and devastations of the global pandemic, climate change impacts, lock-downs and zoom school coalesced and it all felt like TOO MUCH. The 'adjacents' became #NecessaryAdjacents. Creating this work provided a lifeline and escape into small moments of beauty and respite.