UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology FALL 2023 - Flipbook - Page 15
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
a bad view regardless if it is a foggy day or a
sunny day. Kim’s paintings capture buildings
soaring up at closely-set and overlapping angles
from the sidewalk; birds-eye views of great
clusters of architecture and homes banked by fog,
dunes or piers, and the ocean. To view a Kim
Cogan painting is to be dropped into what is
recognizable only as San Francisco.
the work is not literal, and so to view his paintings
is to feel the emotive elements. Too, there is so
much brush activity and visual elements that the
eye does not want to leave the canvas, instead
drawing us in and around and back in again.
The dreamlike or cinematic-noir quality of many
paintings adds to the familiarity.
His 2021 series, “Here Nor There,” was painted
during the pandemic, and Kim found that the
streets and avenues he had always painted
with few-to-no people and cars suddenly were
deserted. In “Walking with Shadows,” from
this series, a man and his shadow meld with
the sidewalk, buildings, and signpost, his face
uplifted as if seeking even one window lit and
active with life, and his shadow seeming to shrug
as it is dragged along behind him. Is he on his
way somewhere or just out because he couldn’t
stand to be inside anymore? As viewers, we
can only guess, but many of us recall our own
deserted-street-walks, our own somnambulistic
musings.
About two weeks after our initial reconnection,
I met with Kim again, this time at Cantina, a
Sunset District taco joint. Kim shared, “The one
thing I’m always trying to give emphasis is the
expressive qualities—not taking something so
literal. Paint has movement and a life of its own.”
His work is based on multiple visits to locations,
and the paintings are an amalgamation of the
photos he takes as well as the emotions he lifts
from the experiences of being on-site at di昀昀erent
times of day with di昀昀erent light quality and levels
of human and fog activity. “Ingleside,” from 2017,
seems a Polaroid moment in time or a lost but
found photo slide of one of the last streets that still
has the palm trees that used to be more common,
with long, nostalgic, afternoon shadows and the
deep blue our skies become when the fog has
completely burned o昀昀.
“Purple Haze” is of the house on the corner of
Great Highway and Cutler Avenue, a little
one-block east-west street that cuts the full
block between Vicente and Wawona Streets in
half. A red brick version of the painting’s house
keeps watch at the corner of Vicente. In the
painting, we are facing south, into a thick fog that
daylight seeps through to make any color pop
unexpectedly. The quality of light, regardless of
time of day, is so surreal in San Francisco that
in the 1950s-1960s, East Coast painters could
not believe Bay Area painters were painting true
colors until they visited.
Nostalgia is also the underlying emotion
triggered by “Edge of the World.” The Cli昀昀
House was where locals went to celebrate
or mourn over epic meals with close friends
and family, the tables next to the west wall of
windows always the preferred reservation. In
Kim’s painting, it is night, and a vintage rag-top
rounding the curve of Point Lobos Avenue to
head down onto Great Highway is seemingly
the only proof of life despite glowing safety lights
and two nearly-indistinguishable cars parked
out front, Sutro Heights’ cli昀昀 rising darkly to the
east. Out late enough for it to truly feel like the
“edge of the world,” the driver must either be lost
or is a local who knows well the Outerlands (the
Avenues nearest the ocean) and the most scenic
routes home.
Even when Northern California wild昀椀re smoke
in 2020 turned the City a strange orange, like in
“Fire in the Sky,” the glare refracted from any light
hitting the Paci昀椀c 昀椀lters through, setting colors
aglow. The yellow of the car in the painting is the
only thing not made hazy. This is the one painting
in the series that seems to stray from nostalgia as
the primary emotion, seems to (despite, again, it
being a vintage car) document our very current
reality of all-too-common wild昀椀res and weather
But it is not only those who are smitten with San
Francisco or know the City intimately that are
able to fall in love with Kim’s work. As he said,
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