Artist Studio Dinner: Kim Booker & Lydia Hamblet

KIM BOOKER: b. 1983, UK, lives and works in London. Working in acrylic on large canvases, Kim Booker uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Her semi-autobiographical paintings often feature figures in poses that are suggestive of differing emotional states, created intuitively through a combination of gestural abstraction and layers of drawn imagery. Elements are scrubbed out, obscured, and over painted, with dynamic strokes and scrawls of colour reflecting both the physicality of painting and the emotions of the painter, self-censorship in real-time. Rooted in the tradition of modern painting, Booker’s work shows the influence of German Expressionism, idiosyncratic British painting, such as the work of Roy Oxlade, and American abstract expressionism - combined with a contemporary perspective on identity and relationships. Booker completed a BFA at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2019, and has since exhibited widely in the UK,…