Welcome to the vibrant world of Kahla Paints, where creativity and craftsmanship converge to bring you a collection of unique works. As an artist with a deep passion for exploring color, texture, and form, Kahla’s work transcends traditional boundaries, inviting viewers into a realm where imagination knows no limits. Explore Kahla’s collection to discover a glimpse into her unique vision. Each piece is a testament to her commitment to creating works that are both visually captivating and deeply meaningful.
Where are you from and where do you currently reside?
I grew up in Oregon, attended art school in Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Las Vegas where I’ve lived for the past ten years. It’s a harsh environment but suits my nocturnal hermit tendencies quite well.
What drew you to become an artist and what type of art do you most enjoy doing?
I absolutely love making things and have always been a generally crafty person with a penchant for trying to DIY things before buying them. In some other timeline I would have loved to create books or music, but composing songs and writing novels might as well be sorcery to me. The visual arts were a much more natural fit, so painting became my outlet for bringing characters and stories to life. Oil painting is by far my favorite, but I also dabble in small sculptures, watercolor, and the occasional drawing.
How would you describe your style?
My style has evolved over the years from straightforward portraiture into some flavor of imaginative realism, mixing traditional rendering techniques with fantastical scenarios and abstraction. The part of my work I always viewed as the weakest link – backgrounds – has become one of the most defining features of my pieces. The fields of abstract color and texture showcase the physical properties of the paint itself and enhance the playfulness of what are usually pretty silly concepts to begin with. When combined with the tightly rendered focal point, you get something that is realistic but still very clearly a painting.
What has kept you engaged and committed to your craft over the years?
Ultimately I love to paint and would still be creating no matter what, but it’s always a pinch-me realization that going to work means hunkering down in my studio and making all my weird thoughts a reality. It’s such a solitary endeavor, from coming up with a concept to actually painting it, that the main motivator for getting back in the studio every day is just my desire to see an idea become reality. Within the last handful of years, I’ve started a few ongoing series that have resulted in quite a long to-do list, so I’m never short of things to paint. I’m not sure I’ve achieved it yet, but I’m forever trying to make the painting that – if I saw it in a gallery – would make me stop and say “I wish I thought of that!”
How have you grown as an artist in the past five years and what are the major contributing factors to your growth?
The last five years have been the most exciting for my art practice. In the studio, experimentation finally resulted in a body of work that feels authentically me in style and subject matter. Part of that was getting a decade’s worth of distance from art school and shaking off the weight of making art that is “serious”. When I do in person events, I’m always thrilled by how many people glance at my work and burst out laughing. It’s one of the few situations where it’s a good thing for people to point and laugh at you.
I’ve also gotten much better about letting go of what’s 100% accurate and instead embracing a healthy dose of artistic license to get pieces closer to what I envision in my head. In the past, I often wrestled with how a concept would work in the real world, and the final results suffered for it. They were stiff or even a bit dull. By letting go of whether an alligator could really fit in a pool floatie, and eschewing strict realism for creativity, the results are far more successful.
What materials do you most commonly use?
Oil paints are my absolute favorite material, specifically Old Holland paint and Gamblin’s Neo Megilp medium. All my paintings begin with a couple layers of acrylic, my favorite being Golden. Covering the bright white void in fast drying acrylic lets me get to the main subject quicker, and the way water based paints behave wet on wet creates some lovely effects that are quite different from oils. Sometimes the acrylic stays a vital part of the background, sometimes it ends up completely covered in subsequent layers of oil. For the surface itself, I always use wood panels. I love painting on a completely smooth finish, and the durability allows me to scrape and sand the backgrounds without worrying about damaging canvas.
Can you describe some of your favorite pieces you’ve worked on?
It’s so difficult to single out individual pieces, but “GET YOUR OWN CHEESE!” was a huge landmark in my work that I will always look at fondly. It’s an opossum on a big pile of various cheeses, and at the time, my intention was just to create a classically styled food still life and add a funny animal to it. It was one of the largest pieces I’d done in years and let me really play with the textures of the different elements – wiry fur done primarily with the edge of a palette knife and the various cheeses rendered with Gamblin’s cold wax medium. I was really proud of how it turned out but never in a million years expected how strongly it would resonate with people, whether for the love of cheese or opossums. Realizing how passionate people are about their cheese, even more passionate than the toothy star of the painting, spawned a whole ongoing series of “GET YOUR OWN” food paintings.
Within the last year, “I Did NOT Think This Through” stands out, which is a cat at the bottom of a goldfish’s tank with a vase over its head as a diving helmet. For several years, it was a tiny pencil scribble in a sketchbook that I would occasionally flip past and think “oh yeah, I wanna get back to that one someday”, but I never felt quite ready to tackle it with the process I was using at the time. Until that piece, my backgrounds had been created entirely with palette knives, squeegees, bits of cardboard, and various other large objects to move paint around in barely controlled chaos. This piece was the first time I used more precise tools (pipettes and syringes) to create the stylized aquarium plants and gravel. It’s a method I’m very excited to develop more in future pieces.
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming artists? Are there any tips or techniques you can offer?
For oil and acrylic, my main advice is always “just keep painting over the ugly parts”. My favorite thing about oils is that everything can be changed, either scraped away or painted over. I think it would surprise some people how hideous a painting can look before it gets to a beautiful final result. I get a lot of questions about painting fur, and my method is to do it in 3+ layers. The first layers are going to look awful, you’ll think you surely ruined it, and then the last layer with all the highlights and little whiskers saves it. But those highlights and little whiskers have to sit on top of that ugly mess to give the fur dimension and depth.
In a more general sense, take every opinion with a grain of salt. Things change. Trends change, the art world changes. When I graduated from art school, most advisors warned me that lowbrow and illustrative work wasn’t popular, and they were probably right about the mainstream fine art world at that time. But skip forward a few years and those genres were thriving. The internet is worldwide, you can find your people no matter how obscure your niche is.
What are your website and social media links?
My website can be found at www.artbykahla.com, and I’m on Instagram as @KahlaPaints.
