certified milk vase with poppies; editioned print

Certified Milk Vase with Poppies. Kim West. 2021.

17.5"x14" image size. 19.5"x16" 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. 

A foot or so down in a backyard garden bed while planting something new, I found an old looking, largely intact glass bottle. A Google search says it's from a dairy that, in the 1920s, used to be just up the road in Glendale, CA. The glass is a little scratched, but remains mostly clear. There are wide vertical ridges around the form, an encircled medical logo with wings and snakes, and the words, "Roger Jessup Certified Milk", are thickly embossed. Kitchen knife sharp, the neck is jagged and raw, but it still feels natural as a vase for garden blooms. 

 #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.