Biography
Kim Painter Chesney is an Atlanta-based artist working in encaustic and mixed media. Her large-scale works draw on a 2,000-year-old process — its name derived from the Greek meaning "to burn in" — to produce surfaces of extraordinary material depth and emotional resonance.
Using layers of beeswax, resin, pigment, and handmade parchments sourced from Thailand, Mexico, Japan, and beyond, Chesney builds compositions that invite close looking: surfaces fused by fire and wax, layered like sediment, evoking memory, archaeology, and transformation. Her work occupies a space between painting and sculpture, where material history and contemporary abstraction meet.
Chesney is a permanent exhibitor with the Encaustic Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the University of Tennessee's Art and Architecture Program. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in private collections.
Artist Statement
Encaustic is both medium and metaphor. Each work begins with organic beeswax, resin, and globally sourced parchments — materials with their own histories, their own geographies. Through repeated applications of heat and fusion, these elements are drawn together into surfaces that carry traces of time and place.
The process is deeply physical. There is no separating the work from the making of it — from the fire, the pressure, the layering. What remains is not a record of decisions so much as an accumulation of experience: preserved, transformed, made permanent by burning.
Selected Exhibitions
Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, New York — 2026
Encaustic Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico — Permanent Exhibitor
University of Tennessee Art & Architecture Program, Knoxville, Tenneessee — Permanent Exhibitor
Van Gogh Art Gallery, Madrid, Spain — 2019–2024
Premier International Art Fairs, Miami / Paris / Marbella — 2024–2025
Selected International Group Exhibitions — 2015–present
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Advocacy & Publications
Chesney has spent decades supporting children's causes and literacy initiatives through fundraising, educational outreach, and the arts. That commitment found a new form in her debut picture book, The Mysterious Night at the Library — a celebration of imagination, friendship, and the transformative power of reading.
The book has reached bestseller status and introduced her voice to a new audience, extending her belief that art and storytelling are among the most enduring ways we pass meaning between generations.