Kim Poor

Elizabeth Kimball de Albuquerque Poor is a Brazilian artist working in Rio and London.

Biography

Kim Poor first exhibited at the age of 12 at a large mixed show in Rio de Janeiro amongst other Brazilian artists such as Scliar and Bianco. At 17 she left Brazil to study Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design in New York City with Larry Rivers and at Skidmore College in upstate New York where she developed a new technique in painting with ground glass on steel. During this period she exhibited extensively in Brazil and New York. In 1982 she enrolled at the Central School of Art and Design in London to pursue her interests in printmaking with Norman Ackroyd R.A.

Her own style and technique of painting uses powdered glass fused on steel and is known as “Diaphanism”, a term since incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary.

When writing about Poor's 1997 work "What the Jaguar Saw", art critic Edward Lucie-Smith said; "Jaguars play a major role in the mythology of the Amazonian Indians. The Brazilian artist Kim Poor, working with a demanding technique in which tiny specks of pure pigment are fused onto a metal surface, here gives the beast a godlike presence." With further reference to the technique, this time in relation to Poor's 1997 work "Macaw and the Moon", he comments, "This is a painting in enamel on metal. The technique the artist uses seems wonderfully well-suited to the mystical atmosphere she wants to evoke, since it allows her to create both the intense colors of the bird in the foreground and the ethereal quality of the figure symbolizing the moon in the background."