Kimbal Bumstead, Contemporary Painting in 2025
By Greg McGee
Kimbal Bumstead is an artist who celebrates colour.
Since 2022, he has brought to the McGees a new energy inculcated by recent success stories exhibiting in Sheffield, Tokyo, Amsterdam and at the Mall Galleries in London, as well as teaching abstract art classes across the UK. Says Kimbal, “It’s really thrilling to be an artist. My job is to bring things into existence that weren’t there before, and I use colour and mark-making to get there. But there are other aspects too. These paintings aren’t just experiments in colour, nor are they just expressions of feelings, they are also explorations of journeys into other worlds.”
The Kimbal Bumstead collection with According to McGee, ‘Segments of Journeys’, is found here online and it does indeed pulse and shimmer, suggesting memories and half formed ideas. “The subject matter isn’t fixed, it’s yet to be defined,” continues Kimbal, “If the idea of journeying is the building block of the painting, the overarching theme is, I think, that there’s no destination. I love the process of trying to let go and getting lost in the painting. That’s a positive to me, and reflects on how I live my life. Stuff happens, you navigate it, and hopefully you enjoy the process. I like trying to see a street differently each time I walk down it, and the same goes for my paintings – each time I look at them I find something new, something I hadn’t noticed before."
'Under the Lea', Kimbal Bumstead
Kimbal points to the intersecting colours and mark making on the surfaces of his paintings, with some strokes sliding into areas that had been painted much earlier. “It’s like landscapes,” he continues, “I like how a landscape in real life has different layers. Physical layers, ideas that people project, memories, different stories, traces of the old next to the new. It’s something I am really keen on capturing.”
Warming to his theme, Kimbal points to his once adopted city. "It's not dissimilar to experiencing York as a city. On one hand you see what's on the surface, the old buildings next to new ones, but then there's another world, the one you have to imagine, the one where different stories have taken place and settled like sediment. That’s really the case with this collection, there is not just one way of seeing it.”
Love x 4, Kimbal Bumstead
“It’s heavy, hefty painting,” Greg says, “At its wild heart there's an antidote to the current obsession with targets and data. This is less harnessing data and more harnessing dreams, which is a priority in most artists' manifestos.”
For Kimbal Bumstead’s art: https://accordingtomcgee.
CIRCLE Ø004, Kimbal Bumstead