SOFT EDGES

Soft Edges marks my return to painting after many years of working primarily through mixed media, sculpture, and installation. Emerging from an extended period of grief, the series considers the ways memory, emotion, and our sense of time shift in the aftermath of loss.

I chose watercolor and gouache for their immediacy and relative fragility. Rather than the physical permanence and density I associate with oil or acrylic, these water-based pigments allowed me to work through thin, accumulating layers—much like memories and emotions themselves, which surface, recede, overlap, and change over time. Landscapes emerge through these layers, not as records of specific places, but as spaces shaped by memory and internal experience.

Across the series, forms gather and disperse, edges dissolve, and passages move between clarity and obscurity. The works consider the fragile thresholds between presence and absence, connection and separation. Rather than attempting to resolve grief, Soft Edges reflects on learning to inhabit its changing terrain—where what is remembered, what is felt, and what remains are continually being reshaped.

“Soft Edges” Navigates Artist Kohl King’s Healing Journey Through Loss and Grief — Broward Arts Journalism Alliance / ArtsCalendar.com