Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College (SKCTC) is pleased to announce that celebrated Kentucky artist Jaime Claire Corum has joined the faculty as an adjunct instructor and artist-in-residence.

SKCTC President Dr. Vic Adams says that the college is “blessed to have such a talented artist join the Southeast family. Jaime’s passion for painting and for connecting with others will have a lasting and positive influence on our students.”

Corum comes to Southeast with impressive credentials and experience. She holds a B.A. in studio art, with an English minor, from Bellarmine University and an M.F.A in art with a painting emphasis from the University of Kentucky. Since earning her degree, she has worked as a full-time artist of commissioned portraits and original compositions. Also, she has taught drawing, painting and photography until recently at Bellarmine.

Although Corum is relocating from Louisville, where she has lived for most of her life, she spent her formative years on the family tree farm in Bell County. “That place still has a big piece of my heart,” she says. In addition to teaching at Southeast, one of her eventual goals is to offer art workshops on the property.

Corum considers herself to be primarily an oil painter and an equine artist “since my subject is almost exclusively the horse.” While she exhibits her work nationally, Bell County residents don’t have to go farther than the courthouse square in Pineville to see one of her favorite creations: a life-size bronze statue of a German Shepherd police dog.

In 2009, she was commissioned to design and execute the state monument honoring K-9 officers killed in the line of duty. Not long before that, she designed and facilitated a mural in Pineville depicting Southeast Kentucky culture and history with the Bell-Whitley Community Action Agency and local youth.

Corum says she is looking forward to watching her Southeast students develop their skills in her drawing and painting classes this fall. She also values the connection between teacher and student and the opportunity to share her talents locally.

“I am super happy to be back home in Bell County and to get art going again at Southeast,” said Corum.

Of her own work, she says, “Though I am very much a realist painter, I want my work to be more than that—more than just the accurately painted horse. I try very hard to capture the individual horse’s spirit and character as well as speak to the cultural connection between horse and human.”

It’s not just craft and technique she wants to share with her students, she says, but “the deeper significance of expressing ideas through the visual arts and finding a path to each student’s own creativity.”

For more information or to register for Corum’s classes, visit us online at https://southeast.kctcs.edu/.