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A little over seven years ago, I made a radical decision — one I felt guided to by my late uncle — to return to a place I had never been. It was a game changer. A spiritual awakening. A series of abrupt left turns, or so it seemed at the time.

Nearly a year after his passing, I found myself in a tiny second-floor studio apartment perched along the Intracoastal. It had two skylights and one small window over the stairs, framing the treetop of a massive oak. My view was limited. Simple. Just what I needed.

Within that cocoon — suspended somewhere between sky and water — I began sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking to my uncle. Inks and acrylics, whatever wanted to move, would spill and blend as Floyd, Petty, and Skynyrd played in the background. There was no plan. No training. No ambition attached to it. Just conversation. Just listening.

Years later, the process remains.

What emerges from these moments is what you see here.

To call them paintings feels too formal. Too contained.

They are moments. Conversations. Time spent in the clouds with my ancestors.

Emergence Painting

Emergence was created through an intuitive process of layering earth-based pigments, acrylic, and ink. There was no predetermined image or traditional composition; instead, the painting developed through stains, ink blots, marks, and color, allowing the materials to guide the work.

Originally painted from a different orientation, the piece revealed something unexpected when it was turned. Within the layers, the profile of a woman emerged — a figure with a moon beneath her chin and delicate lines extending from her hair, suggesting feathers, adornment, or something more ancient and elemental.

Greens, ochres, rusts, reds, and touches of gold create an earthy, almost shamanic presence. The painting remains intentionally open, offering different forms and impressions depending on how it is viewed.

Emergence is about the moment something begins to reveal itself — when what was hidden becomes visible, not because it was deliberately placed there, but because we finally found the perspective from which to see it.

The work invites a slower kind of looking: to turn, to reconsider, and to discover what may have been present all along.

Original painting by Kimberly Dam, signed.

Title: Emergence
Style: Modern Abstract
Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Size: 30x40 Inches
Colors: Greens, Teal, Black, Blue Yellow, Rust, Gold

*No shipping available. Pick up is in Wilmington, NC.

The Spaces Where Healing Fails Painting

The Spaces Where Healing Fails was created during a difficult period, when painting became less about creating something beautiful and more about having somewhere to put what I could not otherwise express.

The work developed through layer upon layer of experimentation — ink, acrylic, texture, interruption, and marks that were made without much concern for whether they belonged. I was not trying to resolve the painting. I was not trying to make it beautiful. I was simply continuing to work.

There is something important in that refusal to make the piece behave. The layers hold both experimentation and resistance: moments of play alongside moments of frustration, destruction alongside creation. Some areas feel carefully considered while others feel almost deliberately disrupted.

Rather than depicting healing as something clean or linear, the painting explores the places where healing breaks down — the spaces where nothing seems to resolve, where we continue anyway, and where making something can become an act of persistence rather than an act of beauty.

Sometimes the work is not about finding the way out.

Sometimes it is about making something in the dark.

Original mixed media painting by Kimberly Dam, signed.

Title: The Spaces Where Healing Fails
Style: Modern Abstract
Medium: Watercolor, Acrylic, Earth-Based Pigments on Canvas
Size: 18x24 Inches
Colors: Greens, Teal, Black, White, Copper

*No shipping available. Pick up is in Wilmington, NC.

In Her Wake Painting

In Her Wake was the first painting I created after my mother’s passing. I began it during an unexpected snowfall in the Southeast — a rare kind of weather that temporarily transformed the familiar landscape into something almost unrecognizable.

The painting began as a landscape, but as the process unfolded, I moved away from representation and toward texture, layering white acrylic into blue ink to create a sense of movement, accumulation, and obscured distance. The resulting field of blues and whites evokes the disorienting quality of a whiteout, where the boundaries between sky, ground, and horizon begin to disappear.

Small mountain-like forms emerge within the composition, almost hidden beneath the layers. They can be read as peaks, or perhaps as something giving way — an avalanche, a landscape in motion, or simply shapes revealed through the storm.

In Her Wake explores the space between what is visible and what has been obscured. It is a painting about absence, movement, and the strange landscapes that emerge when everything familiar has been temporarily covered.

Original acrylic painting by Kimberly Dam, signed.

Title: In Her wake
Style: Modern Abstract
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 24x24 Inches
Colors: Blue, White, Greens

*No shipping available. Pick up is in Wilmington, NC.

Original abstract painting by Wilmington NC artist exploring intuitive visual storytelling.

The Silent Witness of the Fault Painting

The Silent Witness of the Fault emerged through a process of ink, layering, and chance. A series of organic ink blots forms the foundation of the piece, spreading and gathering across a field of earthy blacks, greens, and teals.

Through the layers, a rust-colored line cuts across the surface like a geological fault — an interruption that feels both deliberate and inevitable. It suggests the fractures that exist beneath seemingly stable ground: hidden tensions, shifting plates, and the quiet evidence of forces that cannot always be seen.

The painting is less about the moment of rupture than what remains afterward. The surface becomes a kind of witness — holding the evidence of movement, pressure, and change without explaining it.

The fault does not announce itself.

It simply remains.

Original watercolor painting by Kimberly Dam, signed.

Title: The Silent Witness of the Fault
Style: Modern Abstract
Medium: Watercolor on Canvas
Size: 36x48 Inches
Colors: Greens, Teal, Black, Yellow, Red

*No shipping available. Pick up is in Wilmington, NC.

Apricity Mixed Media Painting

Apricity was created during an early period of my exploration into ink and watercolor, when I was beginning to discover how much expression could exist within the unpredictable movement of the medium.

The piece developed through ink blots, washes, and wispy layers of teal, allowing the materials to move and interact with one another rather than forcing them into a predetermined form. A small passage of red interrupts the cooler palette, creating a subtle point of warmth within the composition.

Created during a period when I was also working on commissioned pieces, Apricity holds a particular place in my practice. It represents a time of experimentation and discovery — a moment when I was learning to trust the movement of the medium and recognize expression within its unpredictability.

The title Apricity, meaning the warmth of the sun on a cold day, reflects that quiet contrast: cool and warm, delicate and unexpected, restraint and release.

Original mixed media painting by Kimberly Dam, signed.

Title: Apricity
Style: Modern Abstract
Medium: Watercolor, Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 20 x 10 Inches
Colors: Blue, Purple, Black, Gold, Red

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