Conant Brook

I never know what the painting will look like until the end of this process and I am always surprised.  I take away from this experience a painting and a memory of the day, of the heat, and the two friends who I painted with. The blues, greens, purples, yellows of the sky and grasses. The water and the distance across the rolling land.  How far away from me this small section of landscape is.  This process creates in me a feeling of joy. To move the oil paint across the canvas with a brush is joy. The colors of nature…composing the image. I look at the paintings whether years, months or days after with a longing to be back in that moment.

conant-brook

Oil on canvas 5″ x 7″ 2016  Price $1,200

Author: Painter - Writer

Kim Gagné is a painter and writer born in Attleboro, Massachusetts. At eighteen, she attended the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, now part of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she earned a BFA in oil painting. At Swain, Gagné studied painting with David Loffler Smith and Ben Martinez. During her third year, she received a fully funded scholarship to attend the nine-week Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture summer residency in Madison, Maine, where she made small landscape paintings. After graduating from Swain, Gagné moved to Manhattan and continued her study of oil painting with Paul Resika and Leland Bell in the MFA program at Parsons School of Design’s New School. She later returned to Massachusetts and began a career with Verizon as a design engineer. In 2019, Gagné received a fellowship to attend the month-long Jentel Artist Residency in Banner, Wyoming. In 2024, she earned an MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview program. Gagné’s paintings and writing are rooted in the childhood, people, places, and values that formed her. Painting and writing are how she investigates the world—through image, language, color, and lived experience. She lives and works on Cape Cod, and her studio is located in the 204 Cultural Arts Municipal Building in Harwich, Massachusetts.

Leave a comment