Kim Frohsin is full of kinetic energy. She can’t help herself. Sitting for a two hour interview is about all she can take before she launches into a session of “Kim-fu” – her own personal martial arts hybrid that lets her channel all that stored up vitality into a controlled, precise, choreographed routine. Kim used to be a competitive race-walker, but recurring injuries forced her to give that up, replacing it with simple walks with her dog and regular sessions of balance and stretching exercises peppered with quick and decisive kicks or punches. Watching this, it’s not hard to make the connection to her art. She is just coming off a self imposed art exile – a month of business and social obligations that have kept her out of her San Francisco studio – but her pent up artistic angst is almost palpable. “Tomorrow,” she says. “This interview is my cut off. Tomorrow I’m getting back to work.” And you know she means it because for Kim Frohsin it’s all about movement, specifically moving forward.

Despite twenty years in San Francisco, Kim still has her southern accent, which becomes more or less pronounced depending on the story she is telling. Growing up in Atlanta, she had a comfortable childhood with live-in help and art lessons on Monday afternoons. “My mom paid for me to have painting lessons with Mrs. Gold. To me she was just a mom in the car pool then, but today I know she is Fay Gold – a major art dealer in the Southeast.” Perhaps it was a sign of things to come. Kim knew she loved art, but it would take her a few years to really get focused. After spending summers in La Jolla with her grandparents, California called and she headed west to San Diego State. She started out studying art but soon switched to humanities and languages, specifically French. The love of that culture took her to the south of France for a year. It was a great experience, but she soon found herself drifting through Europe. Her mom delivered the best advice – come home and do what you love. “My mom was living in Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota at the time. So I went from Provence to Minnesota in the dead of winter! But I started reading books, I painted barns, I studied photographs. I went through all the seasons, and then I applied to art school. That was 1985. I got accepted to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and I’ve been here ever since. I’ve never left.”

In a gentrified neighborhood in between the Fairmont Hotel and North Beach, Kim has set up her studio in what used to be an old grocery store. It’s a large, open space that comes with the quirks of what used to be – grocery shelves line the walls and are now filled with art supplies and books instead of fruits and vegetables. Her dog, Mason, likes to sun himself in the front display window. A mini trampoline shares space with a couple of hula-hoops, and a small stage occupies one corner – lights, props, fabric and a velvet Victorian chair are carefully arranged while dozens of wigs and hats sit on shelves protected by plastic sheets. Clearly this is where the models provide inspiration for Kim’s figurative drawings. Kim’s easel sits toward the back while stacks of packaged-ready-to-send-out artwork line up along the other side of the studio. Inside the brown paper are new paintings. She gently unwraps one to show off the work that the world has yet to see.
Frohsin has done series on a variety of subjects – horses, dogs, abstracted landscapes – but she always returns to the female form, and with her latest series she has pushed herself into some new territory. It is still figurative work, but it comes with a new abstract attitude. As is the case with so much of her work, it starts with her drawings of live models that she views as collaborators in an elaborate artistic dance. “I like to have a theme to work with my muse. Everyone who works with me knows that when you go to Kim’s you have to work. You’ve got to think. For this latest series, my models had to think abstract. ‘How do I abstract my body?’”

We see this interaction in action when we return to Frohsin’s studio a few weeks later. True to her word, Kim is in the studio working. Her model on this day is an athlete, a former competitive ice skater, who contorts her body into powerful poses, holds them for two minutes, and then moves on to the next pose. There is nothing classical or gentile about the posing. Think of it like a freeze frame – the model capturing movement and holding the moment. For her part, Kim straddles a bench in front of the stage. She is balanced on her toes, with one leg stretched backward much like a runner in the starting blocks. With a sketch book in hand, Kim frantically draws – her pencil never leaving the paper. Her eyes dart down every so often, but for the most part she keeps her eyes on the model. Every pose is captured in just two minutes. As the model moves into a new position, Kim flips to a new page and begins again. There is a concentrated, unspoken communication between artist and muse – a relationship built on many hours in the studio together. “Models used to be a treat, but now they are a necessity,” says Kim who schedules these sessions at least once a month.

But the sketches are just the beginning. For her new series, Kim took the drawings and found a whole new way to express herself. Using strips of paper reclaimed from an electric paper shredder, she started placing the strips around her drawing. “The collage was really the link or the segue to the next thing. I got frustrated with the strips because I don’t like straight edges, so one day instead of strips, I taped around Jeannette – her torso – and filled in the silhouette. I filled in all the lines and made black shapes,” she says. “That was the beginning of six months of work.” She put away the paintbrushes and picked up palette knives, moving heavy acrylic paint across the paper, using quick release tape to maintain the shapes that filled in around the female form. “I don’t cook,” she laughs. “But this was kind of like cooking. I had all my ingredients spread out and I really got in the groove. I was excited. I knew this was different – something I hadn’t done before. I knew it was pretty bold.”

Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, Emily Dickinson are just a few of Frohsin’s favorite writers, and she listens to many of them on tape as she paints. For Frohsin, the words are not just background noise. “I don’t know how the brain works, but it does something that facilitates or sets a tone that lets me go. I don’t want to know how it works – that’s the magic. That’ s what feels so good. It’s not a conscious deliberate thing. With paintings I can remember the story, the impact, and the feeling I had from whatever I was listening to at the time,” she explains. Literature and poetry are powerful forces for Kim, and they are part of her painting process, but the real inspiration for her art comes from her own life. “All of my art is autobiographical,” she says. “My series are never random things. They always relate to my life.” Sometimes it’s obvious. “The year my dog, Albert, was dying I did a whole body of work called Treasure Island and Other Local Haunts. I would take Albert over there to this private beach where it was really quiet. I did all these paintings, photographs and drawings. There were a lot of dogs in those paintings. It was very personal. Other series are no less personal, but the autobiographical link is not as obvious.

The mid-to-late 1990’s were professionally productive for Frohsin. She was working non-stop and selling, but on the personal side her marriage was unraveling. She met Randy Sexton when they were both young artists. He worked in an art store. She came in often for supplies. It took her six months to get up the courage to ask him for coffee. Soon enough they were partners, in love and in art. “We had art in common. We liked to draw on location. I bought him his first plein aire easel. I bought one for myself, too and we went out to the stable area on the Stanford campus. I remember it was hot and there were lots of bugs. I didn’t like it, but he did. He did a wonderful little painting of an oak tree. I told him he should keep it and, you know, he still has it – his first plein aire painting.” Today Randall Sexton is a well known Bay Area painter. Kim doesn’t elaborate on what went wrong other than to say the break up was sad but not mean. They divorced in 2001 after 15 years of marriage. “For years Randy was my best friend. We collaborated. I miss having that dialogue with someone. It keeps your juices going. I don’t have that push and pull anymore except with myself,” she says honestly.

Interestingly, about the time her marriage was falling apart, Kim’s art changed – not so much in style or subject matter, but rather in size. She simply stopped painting large canvases. “I just stopped in 1999. It just wasn’t there, and ever since I’ve worked on paper, and I’ve gone really small.” If all her art is autobiographical, what does that say about her? “I’m working my way back to big. I just have to make sure I have something to say,” she says cryptically. While her latest series doesn’t exactly include giant-sized pieces, they are definitely larger than what she had been doing, and there is something more – seemingly a new attitude. She thinks about that for a moment. “Attitude,” she says with an exaggerated southern drawl and just a hint of grin. “Yes, I think that is true – a new attitude.”

These days Kim and her dog Mason are a fixture around her North Beach neighborhood. She has lost weight, gotten in shape and she’s been known to break into a little “Kim Fu” on the sidewalk, but even if it looks a little odd to an outsider, everyone in the neighborhood seems to take it in stride. Usually her style is casual and comfortable, but Kim admits to splurging on a killer pair of Ferragamo stilettos for the Opera Gala in September – all part of her month long hiatus which has been equal parts fun and work. In the past month she has packaged up her new work, reorganized her studio, catalogued and sorted through hundreds of drawings, and celebrated her 46th birthday. The slate is clean. Tomorrow it’s back to business. “I have an idea of where I’ll start,” she says. “But I don’t know where I’ll end up.” She’s talking about her art, of course, but she could just as easily be talking about her life. Kim Frohsin is an artist and a woman on the move even if the ultimate destination is still a mystery.

Written by/Kim Frohsin photo by: Erin Clark

Mason Frohsin, “Ears,” image courtesy Kim Frohsin