Kathryn

Let’s be honest…

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It’s the winter of 2021, the pandemic goes on unabated, and the news about Canada’s vaccine delays only makes matters worse. Artists seem to get lost among all the others struggling to stay afloat. Anxiety and lockdown fatigue often hinder inspiration. No way to sugar coat it…

But art is essential… picture our pandemic life without it! Your walls would be bare, no paintings to offer a different perspective on the world we live in. No sculptures to alter the space they occupy. No music to play when you need to change your mood or just dance, no films or books to make you laugh and cry and enter someone else’s story for a brief time.

Summer Garden with Coleus and Zinnias: Oil on wood panel 30” x 24”

Still I press on and have finished two more paintings. Since we must be the creators of our own joy, I have returned to memories of summer gardens while it snows up a storm outside.

Peachy Petticoats: Oil on wood panel 16” x 20”

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Underway: Painting in the Time of COVID 2

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The fascination with nature’s persistence continues despite my―everyone’s―anxiety over the continuing pandemic. I peer at everything from behind a mask that makes me feel as if my other senses of hearing and sight are impaired. But the patterns made by coleus plants, bubble-gum pink wild roses and hot pink zinnias couldn’t be ignored and I had to capture their radiance. And now that fall has come, bringing darker, colder days, I particularly enjoy working on this painting.

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Summer Garden, oil on wood panel, 30” x 24”
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Painting in the Time of COVID

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A global pandemic is nothing to be sneezed at… yes, pun intended because one of the only two responses I have found is to laugh. The other is to try to get past the wall created by constant worry, to find inspiration and to paint. In mid-March, as the world we knew came to a screeching halt, I was working two small bird paintings and thought I might have come to the end of that series. But by May, things were turning green and flowers began to bloom. On the one hand, nature had wreaked havoc with a horrible virus but on the other, it reminded us that beauty still exists and calls not just our attention but also our protection. This painting is my first direct answer to the darkness of this year: above lush green leaves, yellow-white lilies burst like small explosions of light, punctuated by brilliant red of zinnias and burnt orange black-eyed Susans.

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Sunburst, Oil on wood panel, 30” x 30”

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From the beginning

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I’ve known that I wanted to be an artist since I was six years old. Two events led me to this early decision well before I knew all that it entailed. First, I received the tiny set of oil paints that my red-bearded Great-Uncle Abe had used to paint the miniature still lifes that hung in our hallway. Soon after, my mother took me to see a Claude Monet exhibit at the Portand (Oregon) Art Museum, and I still remember the moment I walked into a room and was immediately surrounded on three sides by his huge and magnificent water lily panels. The colour, the light… that sealed the deal. I eventually took classes in that museum’s children’s department and, after my family moved from Oregon to Ohio, at the Cleveland Art Institute.

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I took art throughout high school and college. I graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in English and then studied drawing and photography at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art. I left school, married and moved to Montreal (Canada) and two years later, my realist watercolours were shown for the first time, in the New Talent Show at Boston’s Alpha Gallery. I also enrolled in classes at the Saidye Bronfman Centre School of Fine Arts and ended up teaching drawing and painting there for ten years, until the school sadly closed for good.

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And “the rest is history” … a history spanning four decades of painting and exhibiting my work in various galleries in the U.S. and Canada, a history during which painting has never grown old and I continue to find inspiration.

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