Twenty-three years ago, in Nîmes, France, a young American stood in a narrow aisle of a French hardware store with “Couleurs & Vernis” etched on the window. She opens a drawer and sees bright powdered pigments in all the colors she has seen spread across the canvases of the Impressionist painters in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She purchases scoopfuls of different pigments and takes them back to the studio with her mentor, a famous fresco master. The colors go into landscapes of the French countryside and later, of the Blue Ridge Mountains of the young woman’s home near Montreat, North Carolina.

A Carolina native, King Hawkinson artistic sensibilities are a remix of Renaissance influenced feminine drawing, and a loose broken stroked style. King Hawkinson studied under Carolina native Benjamin Long IV, an oil painter and master fresco artist. King Hawkinson's paintings are part of private collections in the US, and in Great Britain and France.