At her studio in Brooklyn on a recent morning, Na Kim sighed. She wasn’t sure about her latest painting, a portrait of a woman with brooding eyes and a sweep of dark hair.
“Because I don’t have a goal of what it should look like,” she said, “I spend time afterward thinking, ‘What do I like about it, what do I not like about it?’”
The walls and shelves were lined with dozens of variations of the portrait. Ms. Kim, a petite 38-year-old woman with a chin-length bob, had started the series about two years ago when, acting on a long-held desire to paint, she decided to finish a painting each day. Without quite meaning to, she created a vast body of work. Some of it is on view this month in “Memory Palace,” a solo exhibition at Nicola Vassell Gallery in Manhattan.
