Photo by Adam Frehm
A fascination with making images to create the
illusion of the visual world we perceive as real
started with earliest memory for me. My life has
been imbued with intense visual sensation,
instant thought correlations about pigments,
techniques, mediums and the desire to transmit
the emotional energy I feel, because of the love I
have for what I see. I hope the resulting paintings
will share that feeling with you.
My first art classes were Saturday mornings at the
Cleveland Institute of Art, when I was six. We were
large groups of children with campstools and
drawing boards, our instructors toting huge
buckets of broken crayons, enjoying the privilege
of sitting and drawing for hours amongst the
masterworks of that museum! I have particular
memories of El Grecos, and Luca della Robia
Madonnas, with their gorgeous blue
backgrounds. Later as we waited for mothers to
pick us up we would play hide and seek in the
galleries, often amongst the mummies and other
antiquities. I especially loved the elegantly
sculpted Egyptian cats.
course of several years of Saturday mornings, I really learned how to handle watercolor, to perceive
value and tone, and began to learn to draw the human form. I always loved it, often spending time at
home painting and drawing as well. Time would melt away as my desire to make that image provoke the feeling and sensation of reality took over.
Photo by Adam Frehm
studying drawing, painting, illustration, textiles and
ceramics I married and moved to northeastern Vermont,
part of the back to the land movement of the 70’s. I had
fallen in love with Vermont while I was a student in
Providence. It’s mountains and highlands and long
stretches of unpeopled landscape aligned with my
comfort in solitude and natural beauty. Here I gradually
became focused on the landscape as subject, especially
the rural architecture: metaphor for anything one had to
say. I also was blessed with two amazing children:
Anna in 1983, and Nathan in 1986.
Vermont from New York City, and set up a gallery in their home. I was 27, and have shown nearly every
year since then. I started showing in Burlington 4 years, later, and in Boston several years after that. In
1992 I began a long and productive association with Clarke Galleries in Stowe. I first started showing in
New York City in 1996 with Sherry French, and in 2002 began exhibiting with David Findlay Galleries on
Madison Avenue.
Initially I worked in watercolors, my first medium, making pictures of the buildings and landscape near
Greensboro, Vermont. In the early 1990’s I became interested in nocturnes, and worked to make the
watercolor deep and intense enough to convey the ideas I was moved by. My passion for light required
an exploration of the darkness that makes light apparent. This led me to go back to painting in oil, in
1994, so that I could have a depth of color that would represent the dark, and to do finished charcoal
drawings, with the soft, deep black of that medium.
Photo by Adam Frehm
I still gravitate to rural landscape and architecture, and at times to night views of it. I also became
interested in making pictures of logging work in Vermont, starting with a large watercolor of Claire
Lathrop’s mill in winter in Bristol, Vermont, done in 1995. It has been a privilege to observe and
represent the work of loggers in this state. We live amidst a huge forest, and this work is an integral
part of human endeavor here. I’ve become fascinated by the equipment and machinery involved, the
figures of men working, and the amazing forms of trees in the larger landscape that surrounds them.
In the summer of 2006 I saw a very lively nineteenth century painting of an iceberg close into a harbor
on the coast of Labrador. I became possessed with the desire to see this phenomenon myself and to
paint icebergs, before global warming consigns them to memory. To that end I traveled to the northeast
coast of Newfoundland in the spring of 2008 to paint, draw, photograph and experience this floating ice
first hand. I am supported in this venture by the Vermont Community Foundation. I returned to Vermont
with several small oil paintings, and hundreds of photos, and will be working on larger studio paintings
of icebergs over the next couple years, while continuing local landscape work and commissions.
Please click here to see a PDF for Kathleen's Resume.
