Story and photos by Kathleen Richards
Kim Cogan was the type of kid who loved going to the big city. In this case, it was San Francisco, about a 30-minute drive west from his home in the bucolic, sun-baked suburbs of Contra Costa County. But it wasn’t the iconic images of San Francisco, with its trolley cars, ruddy-colored Golden Gate Bridge or pastel-hued Victorians, that caught his imagination. It was his father’s office downtown, the toy store in Chinatown and the Legion of Honor museum his dad would often take him to. The view of downtown from the Bay Bridge, that’s what Cogan considered “breathtaking.”
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It seems fitting then, after a lifetime as an artist and 10 years as a painter, Cogan is finally achieving some real success depicting the city that has helped shape his life. And he’s doing it his way. His oil paintings of urban landscapes — San Francisco and New York — aim not to be faithful photographic recreations, but rather to capture the mood a certain scene evokes. He chooses vantage points that are often overlooked and are usually devoid of people: underneath a tangle of freeway overpasses (“Freeway”), on a rooftop in New York (“Lower East Side Sunset”) or the façade of a lit-up corner bakery at night (“La Bonita Bakery”). His brushstroke, too, conveys feeling — loose, almost abstract in places, with drips of paint and diffused light. They’re expansive works.
“I wanted to do it big so you could feel like you could step into the painting and really involve the viewer,” Cogan says from his San Francisco apartment, which doubles as his studio.
Cityscape painters rarely achieve success beyond a certain point, which makes Cogan’s rise all the more noteworthy. His paintings are shown in prominent galleries around the United States and sell for between $5,000 and $15,000. Actor Robin Williams owns one of them. He has achieved this measure of success largely by sheer determination. Born in Busan, South Korea, in 1977, Cogan was adopted as an infant by an American family and grew up in the East Bay suburbs of Pleasant Hill, Concord and Walnut Creek. Art always played a major role in his life. “I can’t really think of a time that I wasn’t drawing,” he says. Over the years, he became influenced by graffiti artists like Barry McGee (known as “Twist”) and Dream. “I found out later on that they were Asian American,” Cogan says of the two artists, “and that was really inspiring.”
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Cogan attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he received his BFA in illustration and fine art in 2000. He started working in computer game developing to earn a steady paycheck, all the while painting after work or on the weekends, and occasionally teaching college classes. But soon his day job began taking over, he was painting less and “sort of miserable,” he says. So about five years ago, Cogan quit his job and decided to devote his life to painting, specifically focusing on cityscapes. “I was looking to do something that incorporated my experience and the things around me,” Cogan explains. “I always liked the city growing up in the Bay Area, but I had never tried to convey that through painting.”
He also wanted to emulate the large-scale paintings by artists like Rothko, Diebenkorn, Pollack and Bacon that he’d seen at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. That was easier said than done, considering Cogan was living in a one-bedroom apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district and couldn’t fit a 120-inch canvas inside. He would paint in sections and then attach them with hinges. “I didn’t have any money,” he recalls. “I was running out of paint.” To support his art, he painted apartments, made sandwiches at a cafe and worked with special education students. His hard work paid off. One day, the owner of a gallery he frequented, 111 Minna, saw his slides and asked him to be a part of a group show. His piece sold, so he was asked to do a solo show at the same gallery.
“I’ve been pretty busy ever since,” says the laid-back Cogan.
In the last three years, the artist has continued to paint cityscapes, but has expanded to include New York and nighttime scenes, masterful examples of illuminating light in a dark palette. He also participated in projects relevant to his Asian heritage, illustrating a children’s book called Cooper’s Lesson about a bi-racial Korean American boy in 2002.
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These days, Cogan is equally intrigued by the ocean as he is by the city. He took up surfing about six years ago. “If I’m surfing too much, I know I’ll have to make up the time in the studio,” he confesses. It doesn’t help that his apartment in the Outer Richmond district overlooks the breaking waves of the Pacific. With a view like this, sometimes he just gets swept away.
