"Kim Thoman shows six bold, inventive, lyrical, witty and ingeniously composed canvases, formian
a forthright answer to Freud's celebrated question: "What is it women want?"
They are a major discovery."
 -- Charles Shere, Oakland Tribune Art Critic
ENERGY SHIFTS: The Blacksburg Motion Series of Kim Thoman
by Meredith Tromble
April 16, 2003
Forcing the lock on Kim Thoman's images won't get you much. A viewer who shoulders roughly into her pictures, looking for solid representations and symbols, will find a buzzing horde of shape-shifting marks. A wiry line emerges out of nowhere, coils a few times, then skitters off at an angle. An oval form bounces through several incarnations, appearing first as a tone, then a drawing, then an erasure. A spiral movement manifests in drapery, then in ribbon, before spinning itself into a line. Like sprites escaping Pandora's box, Thoman's images erupt and dissipate, fleeing any pursuer who tries to pin them down.
There was a physical model for many of these paintings, a dying iris seen most clearly in Motion Series #17. For an organism on the brink of non-existence, it is charged with surprising energy. The petals roll as the iris spirit shrugs off its coat of matter. It is this transformation, not the form, that drew Thoman. She had plucked the iris on one of the daily walks she took while in residence at Blacksburg, and pinned it on her studio wall.
As she painted each day, the curling shapes of the shriveling plant mixed with her established vocabulary of forms: voids, vortices, and an edge-and-oval passage that backstops many of the compositions, reading alternately as abstract form and horizon-with-trees.
These signature elements weave through unstable spaces. If Thoman sets up an illusion of distance, she immediately contradicts it. This dynamic can be seen in Motion Series #15: Blacksburg Nightmare where a central tornado seems to touch down on the lower edge of the picture plane, to the fore of a pictured plain clearly indicated with a horizon line. But to the left of the tornado, the picture space slips along a fault line running from the top to the bottom of the paper. Some forms stop at the fault, some slide into it, some reverse value, some merely shift a bit. One skinny oval void, anchored at the left edge, makes it across unscathed.
As one continues to look into Motion Series #15: Blacksburg Nightmare, the underfed oval, so active and thrusting when it enters from the left, seems to stretch, stabilize, and put down roots to reappear as a poplar tree on the right. It is just this change of state, from energy to matter and matter to energy, that is Thoman's constant concern. She manages it in a slightly different way in her digital prints, which often incorporate the photographic image of a string of pearls. The pearls prove to be just as versatile as her drawn shapes, reading as spirals, circles, or lines depending on the context she creates for them.
Although there are occasional flashes of bright color in her paintings, Thoman's characteristic palette is dark, emphasizing value over color. (As revealed in the work Caravaggio's Angel's Wing, the Renaissance master of high-contrast drama is one of her inspirations.) In her work, there is always something lurking in the shadows, even as she proffers a moment of clarity. Thoman's painting, like life, constantly unfolds yet never fully reveals its mysteries.
Meredith Tromble, a California-based art critic, is a co-publisher of Stretcher.org and has a faculty affiliation with the San Francisco Art Institute.
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