Opening: Spirit of the West, an exhibition by Kathryn Stedham

Kathryn Stedham: Spirit of the West

A New Series of Paintings that Capture the Rugged Richness and Solitude of the Southwest Landscape with a Modernist Sensibility

In a series of landscape paintings contained only by the limits of the canvas, Stedham seeks to project an image of the Southwest that is both enduring and true. She feels a strong desire to be in the Southwest, absorbing all that the landscape has to offer. The vast, wide-open topography and rugged formations of New Mexico offer an endless opportunity for creative exploration in her paintings. The artist shares her view of a quickly vanishing landscape. She seeks to capture the rugged escarpments, colorful mesas, and hidden arroyos that make the West wild and intriguing. Stedham starts her process in plein air, visiting these solitary places, getting a feeling for the light and how it changes throughout the day to reveal the best possible framework for a painting. Here she creates small, quick plein air studies that she then takes back to her studio to use as information for larger-scale paintings that will ultimately convey a distilled impression of the landscape she has so thoughtfully studied.