Katherine Kean

About me:

In a sense, the history of landscape painting in the West has always been a history of “memories, dreams, and visions," as Katherine Kean has described her own work. A childhood of moving and traveling around the United States has shaped her vision, as have a long trip to eastern Africa and more recent painting jaunts all over Kean’s now native California and it’s desert environs. But-as per the Western tradition-Kean maintains that her painterly domain is as much soul, spirit, and imagination as it is the great-or seemingly greater-outdoors. Indeed, Kean’s large scaled, richly textured oils and tonally fluid watercolors are products of the studio, as well as “the fresh air”-perhaps even more the studio. After painting many studies on site, in Big Sur or the California mountains, she returns to the studio and effects what is, for her, the definitive artistic process, rethinking and redoing her outdoor studies again and again, working through an idea from sheet to sheet, from canvas to canvas, until she has arrived at the artwork’s ultimate plastic realization-even, in a more ethereal sense, manifestation.

-Gerrit Henry

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