Documenting LA In Oil Paints, Block By Block

Artist Justin N. Kim paints vibrant depictions of L.A. neighborhoods from a bird’s-eye view, creating almost 3-D models of city blocks with oil paints.

He recently spoke with How To LA about how he got started, and his process. It’s all part of an occasional series where we hear from artists about how they see the city.

Block paintings 

Kim is from Fresno, but spent a lot of time in L.A. as a child when he would accompany his parents, who owned a clothing store and would travel to the Fashion District for work.

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“My mom dropped me off somewhere downtown because, you know, I didn't want to tag along,” he says, “and I was walking around, and I saw … skyscrapers, streets, a bunch of cars … smog in the air. I just loved it.”

He moved to the city in 2015 for art school and just a few years ago began painting images of L.A., block by block. He has a series of paintings he calls maps that show top-down, geometric views of the city.

A close up of Justin N. Kim's Downtown LA painting.

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Victoria Alejandro

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LAist

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“If you open Google Maps, and you zoom in enough to see the land and building blocks, this is what you’re going to see,” Kim says about his artwork.

He piles oil paint on top of oil paint so the structures pop off the canvas.

Artist Justin N. Kim stands in front of his oil paintings at his Pasadena studio.

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Victoria Alejandro

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LAist

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The maps come in various sizes and scales. A painting of Downtown L.A. could be the size of printer paper. The depiction of the Forest Lawn cemetery is a large panel with swaths of transparent green. All of his works have a varying color palette — from his paintings of Koreatown to Los Feliz.

“There's a couple of different bodies of work that I do, but I think they all come from the same place,” Kim says. “And that place is where everything's connected. And everything's happening all at once. And I feel like that's true. At least in the maps.”

‘You can do this’ 

After school, Kim did work as an art handler in L.A. but got laid off at the start of the pandemic. That experience, he says, had a silver lining because it gave him a chance to really start work as a painter.

“I thought, OK, I should just give it a go. To be fair for myself, you know, why wait? Because time's gonna run out either way,” he says. “So that's how I got my start.”

He started posting his map paintings on Instagram and then began selling small works of art. That gave him confidence, he says, “and signaled that, ‘OK, you can do this.’”

Before he paints, Kim roughly stencils out the map. Then comes the color. Oil paint can take weeks to fully dry, but once it’s set he goes in with a knife to give it some structure, pulling it up in some places and then peeling it away in others. It has taken up to two months to complete a project.

“It's just waiting for the paint to dry, which is absurd.” But, he says with a laugh, “you can't spell painting without pain.”

Kim’s work represents real places in L.A. in a miniature way. “I feel like it's under my control a little bit,” he says. “I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, but there's a reason why people like miniatures and, for me, it's because you can, like, kind of hold it.”

Koreatown, oil and acrylic on panel, 9 x 12 in, 2022.

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Justin N. Kim

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Check out more of Kim’s work on Instagram and his website. Kim’s work was also featured at the national art showcase for local artists called The Other Art Fair in September. His work will be at the LA Art Show in February 2024.

Listen to the conversation