Small Pool Painting

Kathryn Stedham is recognized for her strong gestural style, which incorporates a rich array of mark-making and painterly surfaces culminating from a lifetime of painting. Stedham's paintings and monoprints have been featured in public and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Her awards include multiple National Endowment for the Arts awards, fellowships and public art commissions. Stedham recently completed an Artist Residency Fellowship at the Rio Mesa Center, a University of Utah field-based program that emphasizes ecology and the environment. "My paintings incorporate a system of drips, scraping and incising, not unlike the natural process of erosion and deposition occurring in the landscape around us." Her work exhibits an atmospheric quality that is expressed through the artist's observations of shifting phenomena and illusions found within the natural world. "This, in its most visible form, is Kathryn Stedham's subject matter. Not the sunset, nor the shadows: what she paints is the experience of being in the moment, on the cusp, between illegible impressions and the instant when what may be vaguely perceived suddenly makes sense. Most of the time it is the briefest of essential experiences. Only when we struggle to see, as when we stare into the distance or the dark, or open our eyes in an unknown place, are we likely to notice it. Yet it's the purpose that our nervous system built itself to achieve, and the source of powerful rewards..." ~ Geoff Wichert, 15 Bytes, Feb. 2010 The artist is a longtime student of the Sanbo Kyodan School of Zen Buddhism. Stedham currently divides her time between southern Utah and Santa Fe, NM., but travels extensively, painting in the North American Southwest, the Middle East, Eurasia and Asia. She is represented by Alan & Allen Fine Arts, Salt Lake City and Parish Gallery, Washington DC.