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Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX) Dreaming In Color 

 


Artist brings sunny outlook to Kemp Center

 

Author: Lana Sweeten-Shults

 

Article Text:

 

Gorgeously plump, playful crimson poppies, happy to be in the sun.

 

A sunflower, bursting, cheerful and yellow.

 

Golden, rusty red trees. Leaning. Smeared. Dripping, oozing in color.

 

A chalky adobe house against a blue, blue, cerulean sky.

 

These are the dreamy images in which Shirley King basks. She brings them to life in her color-imbued paintings that speak with a kind of ethereal glow, a kind of sunniness, a definite happiness.

 

Her paintings have a beauty to them, a spring in their step, a mood visitors to the Kemp Center for the Arts can imbibe when an exhibit of King's work opens in the second floor West End Studio.

 

King has been rediscovering art since retiring three years ago from Time Warner, where she worked as an advertising account executive, a career that found her soon after she received a commercial art degree from the University of Central Oklahoma.

 

"I actually wanted to study architecture," said King, but she didn't live anywhere near an architecture school. "I enjoyed painting, and the arts was the closest I could get to architecture."

 

Looking back, she said she probably wouldn't have made a very good architect after all. While there's an artistic aesthetic to architecture, there's also a technical one that she doesn't know would fit with what she likes to do.

 

Her first job after graduating from college was at a newspaper.

 

"I kind of got that job because of my art degree, but I ended up in sales," she said, and that's what she built her career around.

 

She worked in the same field when she first moved to Wichita Falls - King grew up in the Texas Panhandle town of Phillips - landing her first job at the Times Record News. She also worked in sales at television station KAUZ Channel 3.

 

King lost touch with art over the years, but retirement put her in painting overdrive.

 

"I just hadn't had time to paint except occasionally on the weekends," she said, soon after dropping a paintbrush into some water as she took a break from painting her latest work.

 

King doesn't limit herself to one medium and dabbles in a bit of everything - oils, acrylics and watercolors, though she says she'll probably turn her eye to watercolors for a time. She loves the immediacy of it, she said.

 

And, of course, she's passionate about colors,

 

"I suppose I am a colorist."

 

Her canvases brim with oranges and reds and jeweled blues, yellows and pasture greens. And she seems to have an affinity for nature and landscapes. The subjects of her paintings often include scenes of places she's visited, like Taos or the nearby Wichita Mountains.

 

Her husband, Mike Wilson, loves taking photographs, which come in handy to painters who don't want to trust those scenes to memory alone. She said she often works from photographs, though she has tackled plein-air painting, too.

 

As a birthday present, her husband bought her a plein-air painting session with an artist in Taos. What came of it was a work called "A Taos Morning," of a salmony New Mexican house against purpley, shadowy mountains in the background and fall-colored trees alongside of it.

 

King's paintings also include prairie landscapes of barns and windmills, still lifes of vases, wine glasses and oranges, Southwest-inspired paintings of Native American women and Native American vases, and children, too.

 

King has also sharpened her artistry by taking a class with Graham artist Kaye Franklin at the Kemp Center for the Arts, and she's active with the Wichita Falls Art Association, having exhibited some of her pieces in a few association shows.

 

Her exhibit at the Kemp was her first one-woman show, though anyone who has looked for office supplies at Wilson Office Supply has probably noticed her work on display there, too.

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