Singapore to Townshend: Yeo's Artistic Journey

NOTE: The following was originally published in TOWNSHEND NEWS, Volume 3, Edition 1 (January-February 2025).

As you step into the reception area at Grace Cottage Family Health, your eyes are immediately drawn to the vivid skyscapes on the south wall. With their striking colors and limitless vistas, the paintings bring to mind the sky in all its iterations, from storm tossed evenings to crystal blue afternoons to brilliant awakenings at sunrise.

The paintings are the work of Townshend artist Kim Eng Yeo. They are just the latest chapter in an artistic journey that has taken her from her birthplace in Singapore to Bangkok to New York before landing in Townshend.

Kim didn't start out to get a degree in art. "I was the last child in the family [in Singapore]. My dad had retired and money was tight, so I applied for a scholarship to go to university." The result was a degree in biochemistry. While science provided a practical career, Kim found it limiting." I thought I would die in the lab," she said. "It can be suffocating."

"During that period there were several American painters who did very detailed painting with watercolors and I thought, that's the way to go."-Kim Eng Yeo

She had always been interested in art and had taken classes from an early age. "Singapore was a developing country, just coming out of the woods at that period, and there was no market for art in Southeast Asia. But there was an art school staffed by out-of-work artists who came back with dreams that got shattered," Kim said. "What they passed on to us was their classical training. I went there after school and learned the basics of studio painting."

She had the basics but after marrying her husband Bock Cheng Yeo and moving to Thailand, she decided to continue her art studies.

"After Singapore, we I went to Bangkok for 10 years. I was kind of stuck. The culture was different, the language was different, so I went to a professor at the local arts college to continue my studies. He was an abstract painter trained in Italy. Very, very simple, quiet man. He said, You cannot imitate what has already been done, so you try to find what you want to do. [You have to] understand what has been done before. "Kim experimented with many mediums in Thailand, including oils and acrylics.

Then, in the '70s, Kim and her husband moved to Flushing, New York.

"During that period there were several American painters who did very detailed painting with watercolors and I thought, that's the way to go," Kim said, "because people thought they were only for Chinese brush paintings or the watercolor landscapes that Homer did. These people blew my mind. It was a challenge, and I thought, let's give it a shot."

She started with botanicals. "I knew if you wanted to paint, you had to have something in you. For me it was the flowers. I loved flowers and gardens. I love the play of light." She wanted to capture the essence of the flowers, "because to me when they die, that's it, they are over, their time is very very short." The resulting paintings have an astonishing level of detail, with leaves, stems, petals all coming visible in sharp relief.

"It evolved to bigger and bigger landscape-like works and then eventually I knew I could do that," Kim said. "So then what?"

Kim Eng Yeo with her paintings at Grace Cottage Hospital

As a painter, Kim is always looking for a particular quality. "The word [my mentor] used was 'essence.' You try to get the essence of a subject, which is what it was all about. For me, the most visceral painting of all was Picasso's Guernica, which I saw in black and white at the U.N. To me it was the symbol of that visceral quality that a great artist seeks. That gut feeling, that scream of the horse's mouth trampling on something."

Kim said the skyscapes came about because of COVID. "I went out and bought canvases and I thought, 'I think I'm just going to look up.' ."" These paintings are done in acrylics, another new direction for her. "[Before that] I didn't like acrylics because in the early years, the 80s, the colors were terrible, very neon-like," she said. "They have developed a lot since then. The colors are much better."

Kim and her husband bought their house on Peaked Mountain Road in 2004 and have been full-time residents for 10 years. She said it was "serendipity" that brought her here.

"My husband had retired and we were looking around at different states," she said. "In Vermont, we were looking on the west side of the state, Route 7, that everyone talks about. We didn't see anything. So we gave up. Then there was an ad in the New York Times. It said, '30 perennial beds.' It gave a phone number. The price seemed right. We came in the spring to look at it. It was damp and wet."

Despite the first impression, they decided to take it. "We fixed it up." Kim said. "It had more doors than windows. We changed all that. We had to reinsulate. The first thing was the lay of the land. All the culverts were blocked. Finally this year we did the roof." The remodeled house now includes an artist's studio.

Kim said being an artist in rural Vermont has some benefits. "I think you need to get away from the pressure of the big city. It's too much. You can get really insecure because you're bombarded by visual overload. Here you can shut yourself off if you want to.

"I also like the light here and the atmosphere here. You have to be comfortable in your own skin."

Kim's work can be viewed at Grace Cottage Hospital, Vermont Artisan Designs, Southern Vermont Arts Center and her studio at 628 Peaked Mountain Road. She also has a show coming up Feb. 12-April 2 at the Gallery at the Vault in Springfield, VT. 

Looking back on her career, Kim said, "It's been a long road. The whole point is to develop.