Kimberly Meuse

A native of Iowa, Kimberly earned her Bachelor’s degree in Advertising Design at Iowa State University and pursued early careers as art director for television and as a computer graphics illustrator. While working in the computer graphics field, she created illustrations through object and color layering to achieve a polished style with highly intricate detail. Alone college art course introduced her to the elegant nuances of watercolor painting - a medium she found both captivating and challenging. Kimberly rediscovered her interest in watercolor when her son was born and she chose to redirect her creative talent toward painting in a studio in her home to be close to her child. It is her belief that the unique watercolor technique she devotes to her still life paintings combines her expertise with computer illustration and her love of the watercolor medium. Kimberly infuses her paintings with gentle layers of detail, craftsmanship and an ethereal quality that blends the intuitive skills she has acquired from very different forms of painting.

With a keen eye for the dance of sunlight and shadow on reflective surfaces, Kimberly creates works to emulate and dramatize that courtship in her studies of etched glassware and polished silver antiques pieces set with lush flowers and textured fabrics. In her compositions, she creates visual textural layers: cool metals, sparkling glass, softly flowing drapery, gauzy ribbon and the tender silken petal of a flower. A desire for honesty and depth in her detail, she builds upon a basic knowledge of watercolor painting technique to hone a signature style of painting that is all her own. Through a process of layering or "glazing" paint onto the paper, she is able to obtain a level of depth that brings her work to life with a photo-realistic quality that is quite unusual in watercolor painting.