Kim Matthews Wheaton was born in New York City, and grew up
in San Francisco. Born into a family of artists, art came naturally
to her. Her mother frequently used her as a model when Kim was
growing up. She started painting with oils in high school and
began her exploration of California landscapes during her years
in the Art Department at UC Berkeley, followed by two years of
working and painting in Germany. Her fascination with sunlight
and shadow continued to evolve over a seventeen year period of
painting architectural compositions in gouache across San
Francisco and the cityscapes of France, Italy and Greece. Then,
twenty-five years ago, she moved from the Bay Area to Eastern
Washington and was completely captured by the scale and
simplicity of the unending open spaces surrounding her. Here she
returned to the oils and large canvases of her early training to
tackle the challenges of scale and subtleties of light in the high
rolling country of the Palouse. Recently she has taken what the
Columbia Basin has taught her to landscapes across North
America, Scotland, France and Italy. She now lives west of the
Cascades in the low, wet lands of the Northwest Coast, returning
frequently to paint in Eastern Washington, while also exploring
the new landscapes around her.