She was considered something of a child prodigy and first exhibited at the age of 12 at a large mixed show in Rio de Janeiro among other Brazilian artists such as Scliar and Bianco. At 17 Kim left Brazil to study Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design in New York City with Larry Rivers and, under the tutelage of Professor Earl Pardon, at Skidmore College in upstate New York where she developed a new technique in enamel painting on steel. During this period her reputation grew as she exhibited extensively in Brazil and New York. She was awarded prizes and honours for her achievements by the Beaux Arts Institute of Brazil and also produced a series of illustrations for the Broadway magician Doug Henning. Her work has been published internationally since 1972 when she produced a series of cards for the Pan American Foundation (a branch of the United Nations for the benefit of children's education).

In 1975 she was granted special permission at the Central School of Art to further her development in the technique she had pioneered and also to work on printmaking with Norman Ackroyd R.A. While in England she began designing her numerous record sleeves.

Can Utility and the Coastliners
© 1977

Front cover of 'Genesis Lyrics'
Watercolour. 35 x 47 cm

Exhibited at the Thumb Gallery, 1979, London
"... By our command waters retreat, show my power, halt at my feet ..."

Kim first met Genesis in December 1974. The supergroup's strong visual show, their lyrics and music had a strong effect on her. From the moment she showed her work to them it was clear that her paintings and their music had particular affinities - a common ground of feeling, taste and inspiration. Genesis, known for their ethereal music, pioneered the use of visual theatrics in rock performances and they created a continuity of sound and vision, music, literature and art. This marriage of word and picture inspired Kim to create a magical book of lithographs, watercolours, oils, etchings, egg tempera and glass on steel called 'Genesis Lyrics'.

In Kim's world everything is possible, both for the dreamer and the dreamed - the inward eye sees what it chooses. Sometimes it sees vaguely, figures as shadowy as lost friends, seen through the gauze of memory as misconnections, lost possibilities. Sometimes it sees clearly, stark, frozen visions of dark woods and dead castles, pools that death watches. Always it sees its own logic, the logic of myth and imagining - Here are places where who you are is wood, water and rainbow.

Entangled     
Entangled
© 1977

Watercolour 32 x 44 cm
Exhibited at the Thumb Gallery, 1979, London
"... Sentenced to drift far away now ... Sometimes entangled in your own dreams."

Introduction to Kim Poor by Jo Durden-Smith
New York 1978

In Kim Poor's world it is always winter, that Gothic winter of the heart when "natural things exist only a little," as Baudelaire said, "and reality lies only in dreams." her men-women, sometimes surviving only as their reflections, are eyeless for the most part, as if their pupils are turned back into their heads, to examine other secret landscapes there, where other moons preside. In her world, everything is possible, both for the dreamer and the dreamed. The inward eye sees what it chooses.

Sometimes it sees vaguely, figures as shadowy as lost friends, seen through the gauze of memory as misconnections, lost possibilities. Sometimes it sees clearly, stark, frozen visions of dark woods and dead castles, pools that death watches. Always it sees with its own logic, the logic of myth and imagining. here are places where who you are is wood, water and rainbow: where your barrage-balloon parents are tangled in the paraphernalia of your own childhood: where the man in the moon is joker, kite and hanged man: and where Ophelia becomes Lilith, the spirit of vengeance, and Harlequin is robbed of his face. "His gaiety, like his candle, is dead," as Verlaine says, "and today his ghosts haunt us, slim and bright."

Mad Man Moon
© 1979

Watercolour 56 x 40 cm
Exhibited at the Thumb Gallery, 1979, London
"... So I pretended to have wings for my arms. And took off in the air"

These figures are old. They live, with malign dwarves and vegetable gods, in the collective consciousness, the womb of imagination. And if they are familiar it is because others have visited the territory they inhabit before. Blake saw at the heart of his visions men made of sunlight, born on the wind. Gustav Moreau saw angels, dragons and sphinxes. And, at what Gauguin called "the mysterious centre of thought," Belgian Symbolists like Jean Delville and Emile Fabry found creatures with lost eyes and the magical disconnections of illusions.

Harlequin
© 1979

Watercolour
Exhibited at the Thumb Gallery, 1979, London
    
"... Theirs was the laughter in the winding stream, and in between"

These are some of the sources Kim Poor has drawn on in her etchings and lithographs, her watercolours and oils, and her beautiful ghostly enamels. In the furious whirlings of her water and sky, in the blank tenderness of her faces, there are echoes of Blake and Delville, Beardsley and the pre-Raphaelites.

These, though, are European painters. Kim Poor is a young Brazilian. And this means that in working within the tradition they represent she has had to reinvent it for herself. She has had to learn for herself the geography of this country of the mind. She has had to find in herself, as well as in the music and lyrics of Genesis, the androgynes and oneiric landscapes that fill this book.

This is what gives her work its special quality. This is what makes this book special. Kim Poor has used the fractured imagery of music as a way of making her dreams real.

Apocalypse In 9/8     
Apocalypse In 9/8
© 1979

Watercolour 42 x 42 cm
Exhibited at the Thumb Gallery, 1979, London

A poem by the artist
© 1979

The news is bad news
The dreams are mostly nightmares
A private world is the only sanctuary
the only sanity

This private world has no boundaries, no institutions
no citizens but of your own making
What happens happens because you will it
because you dream it
It is who you are
Its geography and history are private
Its men and beasts see what you see
if you will them to
They have no eyes, if you do not

Music is the language of this world beyond twilight
The trees stand stark as notes on a page
The waters ripple and roar
The birds sing whole orchestras
or else are silent
Whatever you wish

I am Brazilian
from a strange country near the edge of the world
where colours are bright and nothing is quite real
Its rhythms are soft and urgent
Its people are as sharp as sunlight
or as airy and evanescent as ghosts
The music binds them and bleeds them
They become one another

Music matters
The waters of my childhood matter
This private sanctuary of ghosts and dreaming
This real world just behind your eyes, matters too
It is a place where reflections can be left behind
and faces ride in the streams
A place where everything is possible and you are possible

Genesis play my music in this place
They have helped find the place for me
There have been times too
when I have helped lead them there.
"Entangled" and "Eleventh Earl of Mar" were written about my pictures
It may not be your place
the place you will see in this book.
Everyone has their own place
But Genesis play their music there too

© Kim Poor 1979
"... Gonna blow right down inside your soul"

Go back