Kim Evans harnesses her dreams to create dark, otherworldly paintings

Kim Evans had just killed a skink. She saw it basking in the sun and tried to catch it, but the lizard didn’t survive the clumsy handling of a four or five year old. Horrified, she dug a little grave in her parents’ backyard in country Victoria and used a stone to mark the spot.

Later, she began to question if it really was dead; had she buried it alive? When she rushed out to exhume the lizard, she only found its skeleton.

Kim – a painter, illustrator, writer and more – has been a professional artist for more than 30 years, exhibiting among celebrated artists and with artwork held in private collections around the world. She shared this memory with me over a mocha at Healesville Hotel.

Self Portrait with Monkey and Skull. Kim draws inspiration from the local wildlife in Healesville.

“Even though my family isn’t religious, I felt this really deep need to honour its life,” she says. “Those things stuck with me about my connection to animals and to other living things.”

The animal nature of humans is a recurring theme in her surreal artwork, often blending female figures with animals like birds, and evoking the feminine psyche using a raft of symbolism viewers can dive into. With muted, earthy colours and sharp detail, her paintings are otherworldly, almost morbid. Like they’ve been pulled from the dark fantasy of Pan’s Labyrinth.

It’s easy to see how Kim’s dreams often inspire her work. As she eloquently wrote for an interview with Miroir Magazine: “Dreaming was as natural and vivid as my experiences of the day, yet far more magical, expansive and filled with limitless possibility.”

“Art is a calm place for me too, a place for me to regroup”

But a mind full of tangible dreaming and introspection doesn’t come at the expense of Earth-bound passions. Kim is incredibly grounded and truly in love with the Australian wildlife. It’s no surprise when she’s literally surrounded by it as a Healesville local, a town among the Yarra Valley vineyards, famous for its native animals.

“At this time of year, if I’m in my studio and the doors are open, the birds will come in. King parrots will come in and sit on sculptures and just chatter away. They want to be fed,” Kim says, laughing.

“When I feel my heart’s open and I’m in a really beautiful space, it’s amazing how unafraid they are.”

Her painting Empath, for instance, which is currently exhibiting in the Naia Museum in France, expresses the empathic connection she has with the local birds.

“Some people say I need to know exactly what I’m painting about, but, no I don’t. How people come to paintings, their ideas, what they’re feeling and wherever they’re at in their life, can be totally different to where I’m at. And I love that, it means they’re connecting with the art.”

Empath is highly detailed, with more things seeming to emerge the first, second or even third time you look at it, yet it doesn’t feel cluttered. It has a skewed symmetry, like the inky butterfly a psychologist might show you for your interpretation. (Wait, does everyone else see a butterfly?) I asked Kim how she manages to keep the painting so clean, but immersive.

“I don’t ever think about not putting too much, or not enough. I go with what I feel in the moment with my drawings. Things are added, but never taken away,” she says.

“With paintings it’s a little different. I have a loose idea of what I want it to look like before I start, and they have a more conscious structural element. There are universal archetypes and themes, but there’s also always a bit of me in it.”

“Dreaming was as natural and vivid as my experiences of the day, yet far more magical, expansive and filled with limitless possibility.”

Art and artists surrounded Kim when she was growing up, with a creative, artsy family and easy access to the Montsalvat artist community in Eltham.

Her mother used to help Kim draw animals from photos in books. And her father bought Kim her first set of acrylics, brushes and panels, which she used to paint her first portraits of French mime artist Marcel Marceau when, as a child, she saw him perform at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

But in her middle teenage years, Kim began to question her career and almost left school to become an apprentice chef.

“I’ll never forget, my mum pulled me aside and said, ‘if you were given the choice between your art and being a chef, what would you want to do?’. I said art, and she said, ‘then stay at school’.”

Kim grinned at the memory. “What a gift! Obviously that’s not the easier road to go, but she’d known all my life how passionate I was about my artwork and about creating, so that was a blessing from my mum.”

One of the more subtle influences leading to her immersion into art was her great grandfather Stanley, who died two years before Kim was born.

Stanley is an enduring mystery for Kim because he too was a professional artist and art restorer, working in the UK from the 1920s onwards.

“He was in a dream once, and that was a beauty,” she says.

“I’ve always felt that was him actually visiting me, as weird as that might sound. They’re the dreams that are really poignant.”

From the 1990s to 2010, Kim worked as an editorial illustrator for publications including AFR’s Boss Magazine and The Age.

But in Australia at the time, Kim explains, editorial illustration was conservative. So when she landed a job at Motor Magazine – despite not being a “car person” – she found creative freedom from her editor who was fascinated by the more liberal and surreal European illustration scene like she was.

“I was like, where have you been all my life?” Kim says. “We had such a strong working relationship that I didn’t need to do roughs, they just trusted the images I came up with.”

So after 30-odd years of painting, drawing and dreaming, does she ever get tired of it?

“Never. Never. There’s just so much to get inspired by. Art is a calm place for me too, a place for me to regroup. If I get completely overwhelmed, which I can do very easily by too much stimulus, it’s the place I go to digest and leave my mind so the real things can come through. It’s in my blood.”

What’s more, Kim is currently working on a novel. She won’t tell me what it’s about, but she assured me it’ll be just as dark and surreal as her artwork.