While stylistically influenced by graffiti, torn layers of city billboards, old building walls, I float between allowing a painting to organically determine its own direction and expression, and deliberately choosing subject matters that range from personal to controversial, painful to provocative, ironic to bizarre. I always have a very strong connection to the stories and subjects that I paint, whether they’re taken from the everyday lives of others, or from my own. Because the “everyday” is something that often gets overlooked or seen with indifference, I fill my paintings with controlled commotion and simplified exaggeration in order to grab the viewer’s attention and cause them to really observe, decipher, and hopefully see these everyday happenings from a new perspective.

With the use of acrylics, joint compound, spray paint, wax pastels, pencils, and sometimes newspaper/magazines, I overlap and intertwine figures, shapes, text and objects. By doing this, I feel I have almost unlimited space within the confinement of the four walls of the canvas. My work is often filled with action and chaos, while still maintaining a certain balance and control, much like life itself.

Kim Schmitt Thomas was born in 1970 in the Hell’s Kitchen area of NYC to two young actors, then later raised in nearby Bergen County, NJ, where she currently works and resides with her 7 year old twin girls. Her early childhood was often spent drawing caricatures of flamboyant dancers and actors in theatre wings and dressing rooms, after being inspired by an Al Hirschfeld drawing of her mom in The Sunshine Boys. She also spent many afternoons studying graffiti covered billboards on the streets of the NYC while bar hopping for Shirley Temples with her babysitter, a retired longshoreman. Those colorful early years, along with her own extensive training in dance and acting, have had a great influence on the energetic line quality, and exaggerated, distorted figures and faces that are intertwined throughout most of her work.

After attending the University of Bridgeport in the late 80s where she majored in Illustration, Kim transferred into the Fine Arts program at Montclair State University, while she freelanced as an illustrator, designing program covers and logos for small NYC theatre companies, as well as creating animated logos for the TV/film production company, Bert Stratford Productions. Currently, Kim concentrates mostly on her studio painting.