Kate McGee

www.khmland.com

I have always drawn and painted. Growing up in a busy family with five kids that valued creativity in all the arts, I was the designated visual artist. Later, after the Big Detour--a degree in Economics, an MBA and many years as a financial analyst--I chose a landscape architecture career that honed my designer's eye and drawing skills. Those years of creating three dimensional spaces, designing with shadow, sunlight, color and texture, naturally inspired my passion for painting landscapes.

I started painting with pastels when I found an old set of NuPastels and a moleskin sketchbook left behind by my artist daughter. When I turned 50, my children grown, I decided to put in my 10,000 hours to master pastel painting. Now, 7 years later, I've participated in many juried shows, solo shows and group shows and have even been published in a national magazine. I quit my day job and became a full time artist when I moved to the King's Valley area a couple of years ago.

I paint plein air with Vineyards & Vistas in the summer and belong to the Corvallis Art Guild, Purely Pastel Artists, the Pastel Society of Oregon and the Northwest Pastel Society.

My pastel landscapes are real and imagined places. Each painting is an experiment to express an idea about place and atmosphere. They are painted pretty quickly, over a day or two, and many do not succeed. I am not patient but I am persistent.

I go back to the same places to paint over and over again to record the weather, the quality of light, the reflection of water, the growth of grasses; all the changes in a place over time. Familiarity breeds understanding and a focused sense of the place so that I can express its fundamental nature simply.

I also painting from memory, entering places I have visited in the past. These imaginings are strong images distilled as designs as well as places. I often work over old, failed, pieces that peek thru, influencing the new layers of pastel, a bit of a surprise. The sanded paper and fixative spray allow for layer upon layer of pastel, glazes of color that aren't muddy. The large blocky pastels I use don't lend themselves to fine detail.

My biggest influences are Wolfe Kahn, for his fearless colors and seemingly simple annotated landscapes, and Degas, for his compositions and use of warm and cool colors. Stuart Shil's atmospheric, poetic landscapes are also favorites of mine.