- I'm from England, London originally, but I lived most of my adult life in Venezuela, South America.

Basically I'm a painter.

Oil on canvas.

It's just, it's a very ancient medium.

It's a very rich medium.

There's so much to explore with it.

I learned over time that if I got stuck on a painting, it was sometimes useful to sort of go to sleep on it and often kind of ideas would occur, you know, let your unconscious mind do a bit of the work rather than trying to force it so much.

Artists get asked a lot what the message is.

But I would say that there was, there's an English curator, art historian who just made this really useful observation about that is that artists don't necessarily kind of identify this is what I want to say.

You're moved more by a compulsion.

So there's something about this image here, there was something about that figure and that color that it's repeated in quite a lot of paintings or at least they start out that way just because I, you get sort of fixated on that figure and that color, and something about me keeps making me want to come back, and that's my starting point.

But it's not because I want to say blah, blah blah blah, blah.

Just this thing is keeps bugging me.

And so it's a way of working through that for sure.

Yeah, it's kind of more obsessive than that.

And I always had this idea that the sort of painting that I was interested in, Matisse, the Fauvists, that you couldn't really paint like that in England because it's very gray.

It's very sort of rainy.

And also there's a sort of tradition of painters or the ones that I was looking at of going south and how that sort of really was a kind of key moment in their development as painters.

So I had this idea that I was looking for light.

When I ended up going to Venezuela, we ended up living in the southeast of the country in an industrial city.

I don't think you could get any more light than that 'cause it's quite near the equator.

And at the same time I was reading a lot of feminist art history, which was quite important at the end of the 70s with the feminist movement.

And I did have a sort of conflict with that, with the representation of the female figure, but identifying with it at the same time as identifying with the painter.

So there was definitely that kind of conflict inherent in the sort of things that I felt that I could work with.

And so my way of dealing with that was actually to leave the human figure out for a long, long time, which was why I was looking at landscapes and the built environment, which is a manifestation of people, but in a different way.

Most of the paintings that are here is that they were about the Venezuelan migration, which has just been quite dramatic over the last few years.

It's now around 7 million people out of a population that was maybe maximum 30 million.

So it's a lot of people, and I suppose it does kind of hit you harder when you see people and places that are familiar to you.

So the Venezuela migration has been going on since the year 2000 with these political changes that have been going on.

So a lot of young people went abroad 'cause there were some protests that were getting kind of really cracked down upon, putting, I mean, young people were getting killed, put in prison, so anybody who could get their kids out of the country did.

And then we left in 2016.

But then after that, the migration has been increasingly more desperate.

I mean, people leave on foot, you know, these incredibly, sorry, I can only think of the word in Spanish, but you know, really difficult journeys just with what you've got on your back, carrying kids, just whatever, just because you can't get enough to eat.

And so a lot of those people cross over the border to Columbia.

A lot of the people that cross over have to wade over these rivers.

But it's also what you see in, I don't, there was a documentary the other day about the Darién Gap, which is between Columbia and Panama, and it's a very sort of daunting place to have to walk through.

So a lot of those images come from these river crossings where people are just, you know, carrying everything on their heads.

It's something that I've always done.

We always did art workshops in the industries that I worked in, in Venezuela.

And over time through community work, we developed this kind of mapping project.

And a lot of it is motivated by ecological concerns and wanting to kind of get that conversation started with kids.

Basically what we do is sort of do a walkabout of an area.

Usually I try and make it the people's neighborhoods so that we're looking at the place that we actually live in.

And then we come back and make these big collective paintings.

As you can see, they're enormous.

So it's kind of a size that most people won't have worked on.

For them it will just be about, you know, splashing some paint around and trying that out, you know, in a medium that they probably wouldn't have used before.

But they're just learning about not, you know, boundaries, working with somebody else next to me and not spilling on their work.

The great thing at the end is that we lift up this collective painting, and they can see how everything actually comes together in a whole map.

And that's like I say, like the beginning of a conversation so that our environment isn't just a given.

It's not just like it was always like this, and it's always going to be like this.

We can actually participate and decide to, you know, how we want things to be, which I think is really, really important with the ecological crisis that we have.

We came here from Venezuela about seven years ago, and I discovered the Prairie Ronde Residency in an online news item and sort of, wow, that's near.

I gotta go and find out about this.

And did the residency at the end of 2018, when they hadn't even really started any work on the building.

But since I live locally, it's been a sort of ongoing relationship, and I sort of make this joke that I just declared myself a permanent resident.

So yeah, been very grateful to have the space and to be able to carry on like this.

Just for me, art has been so important in my life.

It's sort of, you know, here's this cool thing that's just been really important.

It's been kind of the backbone of my life, so have a try.

(soothing music) - [Kim] Be sure to tune in next week when we learn even more about the history and renovation efforts at the Mill at Vicksburg.

(soothing music) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.