Thursday, March 3, 2011

March 2011 Art Show--Kimberly Day Proctor





Kimberly Day Proctor of Southbury (i think it is southbury)

Kimberly Day Proctor is carrying on a family tradition of art and design. Her great grandfather, Sumner Kinsley, was a well-known painter and illustrator, her grandfather, Rex Beisel, an innovative designer of aircraft, and two aunts, painters of note. There never was a time or a doubt in Ms. Proctor's mind that she would become an artist herself, and in 1978, she received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and Printmaking.

Following an intensive workshop with artist Randall Enos, she spent time exploring the medium of block print collage, a process which involves printing numerous colored editions of an image on various types and colors of paper, then disassembling and reassembling individual parts to bring them back to a finished whole.

An innovator herself, Ms. Proctor has experimented in various other media from pastels to oils to pen and ink. But the thematic content of her work has been consistent - interpretations of the threatened, ever-changing natural landscape and it's flora. In addition to rendering native plants, shrubs and trees, many years of illustration the Oliver Nurseries catalog, gave her an opportunity for great intimacy with ornamental plants and sharpened her skill ot render them with great sensitivity and botanical accuracy.

Her pen and ink illustrations have appeared most recently in Gardening for a Lifetime by Sydney Eddison (Timber Press 2010) and in Eddison's earlier book, Gardens to Go (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and in numberous catalogs, newsletters and advertisements for Oliver Nurseries of Fairfield, CT and Twombly Nursery of Monroe, CT.

Her work has been shown in galleries throughout the Northeast, recently earning a first place award for pastel from Richter Association for the The Arts in Danbury, CT.