Kim Buck

Profile

My name is Kim. I’m 24. I have one year left at art school. I love to draw.

Art snuck up on me. I finished half of a psychology degree and then began science before a little insistent urge inside became too loud to continue ignoring: draw draw draw …

And so it began.

Drawing from photographs in books with pencil on old scraps of paper lead to portraits of family and friends. Perhaps the most fateful and significant conversation of my life followed soon after, with a man whose name I can’t even remember, no matter how hard I try. He said I should try drawing with charcoal. As soon as that old scratchy piece of burnt wood I found in my mum’s art box touched the paper, I swear I could hear the creaking as the doors that had been stubbornly blocking the road ahead began to swing open. It was like that feeling when suddenly, the tangle of wool that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick magically comes apart with the simple looping of one string through another.

That was three years ago. I was soon fascinated by the human body. Compared to the portraits I’d been working on, the idea of a ‘faceless’ subject was captivating, where the form of the figure was the emphasis rather than their identity. That sense of anonymity has been important as my own work has developed. Although the models in the drawings are friends, their identity is intentionally ambiguous to (hopefully) allow what the picture is about to be the focus rather than who it is of.

I’ve got no idea where the art road will lead but for now, getting up every morning knowing the day will be shaped by the stick of charcoal in my hand is pretty damn cool.

Enough about my work. I’m off to have a look at yours…