Featured Artist Kim Villagante

Last spring in Vancouver I met Kim Villagante on the UBC campus to tour her studio and discuss art. She's a dynamo - draws, paints, writes, speaks, sings, composes. Over the summer she created and cultivated the Main Street Art Collective, a group of diverse visual artists who cooperate in creative endeavors and create themed work. Their first collection - Small Messages - considers symbolic communication on postcard (5x7) canvas. The group will begin showing the work at the Our Town Cafe in Vancouver, where they have been meeting regularly.

"My art is influenced by graffiti, the flow and the patterns I notice in the world around me, by the passion in music, by my convictions, by my relevations, by emotion, by poetry, by people, by the divine, by love, by pain. A single art piece encapsulates a duality of everything the artist knows and does not know. My art is a raw manifestation and expression of my life being lived."

To see and read her work

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimvillagante

To hear her music

http://www.myspace.com/kimvillagantemusic