ABOUT KIM MCLAUGHLIN

Paintings celebrating lost stories from found photos. Ephemeral moments, vintage times, forgotten people recorded in watercolor, oil and acrylic.

My paintings are often based on vintage black and white snapshots found in eBay lots. I like the idea of "rescuing" these, and giving a contemporary viewer a chance to see interesting stories and lives. Relationships between the subjects in the photos are often very clear. If there are captions, I'm often searching for more information about them.

These photo lots often fall on the eBay market because the owner passed away without heirs. Batches of photos from the same source can tell an evolving story. My paintings are watercolors or acrylics. After a career as a graphic designer, it is a delight to get back to those media that were initially appealing to me. The “story telling” aspect is what I want to capture.  My influences are many of the trends from the first half of the 20th century— American Realism, The Golden Age of Illustration, Pulp Magazines, and more.