Local landscape on canvas

Kim Matthews Wheaton discusses arid eastern Washington

MOSES LAKE — "I love being able to see really far distances," said Kim Matthews Wheaton, a Moses Lake painter who is currently displaying her work at the Noon Moon Coffee House and Dessert Bar in a show that opened this month. She explained that she enjoys seeing the landscape recede in her paintings.

Additionally, the artist's work is hanging at Rhapsody in Brew and at the Grant County Advanced Technologies Education Center (ATEC) at Big Bend Community College.

Last week, Matthews Wheaton was hanging her landscapes at the Noon Moon and made comment on her recent switch from watercolors to oil on canvas.

"I really am an oil painter," Matthews Wheaton said. She has returned to using oils after nearly 20 years of working with watercolors and smiles about the change as though coming home after a long trip abroad.

"I started with oils in high school and college and then switched to watercolors, but I prefer the looseness and feel of oils," said Matthews Wheaton.

Matthews Wheaton grew up surrounded by artists and knew in third grade that she would make art her job.

"My grandfather was a painter. My mom paints in oils. My three siblings are artists. Art was an acceptable profession," Matthews Wheaton explained.

She majored in art at the University of California Berkeley and said that if she were not a painter she would be a photographer.

Matthews Wheaton's work explores the landscape of eastern Washington with great attention to light and dark and color. She is drawn to the simplicity of the landscape in this area, to the ability to simplify shapes into their most basic expressions.

For that reason, if Matthews Wheaton had to choose a genre other than landscapes, she would paint still life for the opportunity at a similar kind of simplicity.

When Matthews Wheaton is not painting, she is busy with her family. As her children have slowly emptied her home, she has devoted more time to her work and made a conscious decision to paint as often as possible with her youngest child now in a Canadian boarding school.

Matthews Wheaton admits that she still is unable to paint as much as she would like to, but on days when she does have the time, she loads up her car with painting boards and a camera and drives to scout landscapes. If she finds a landscape that is particularly interesting to her, she will do a study of it while sitting in her car, then snap a few photos and head to another location. The day following her landscape expedition is a studio painting day.

"I finish some paintings in a day and others, I paint and then look at them for a few days," Matthews Wheaton said.

Of the driving and seeing the landscape, Matthews Wheaton is quietly in awe.

"I grew up in the city, but I love it here," Matthews Wheaton said. "I love the climate, the open spaces."