Kathryn Stedham is a horsewoman. She rides four days a week and competes in Western dressage. Her fascination with horses began when she was perhaps 4 or 5 and looked out the window toward her neighbor’s house and saw a large, black, prancing “creature” that she later learned was a horse. “I was in love,” she recalls. “I wanted a horse and became obsessed with them because you always want what you can’t have. So I would just draw and paint them. I had my anatomy books and I knew all the breeds.”
Rain Sheets, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.
Drawing and painting horses led her to become a painter, trained in the academic tradition and painting with naturalistic elements which she now edits to the essential. She moved to the West in 2005, first to Utah and then to Northern New Mexico.
In her artist’s statement for the Autry Museum’s Masters of the American West exhibition, she says, “I’m not concerned with realism. I’m also not concerned with an accurate representation of a scene. I’m a painter’s painter, meaning for me, it is about the paint, about that expression, what a place feels like rather than what it looks like.”
Four Amigos, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.
Painting in her new studio, she found herself not editing so much as discovering that a painting could be finished sooner than she might have expected. “I think it takes a lot of confidence to stop yourself and say ‘there it is,’ rather than overwork it and try to make the painting about five different things. I’m trying to give people enough information to pull them into the painting and then be inside the painting.”
She had previously created a unique blend of her classic realism training with the modernist movements of Northern New Mexico and was drawn to the philosophy of the Transcendental Painting Group of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s founder, Raymond Jonson, wrote that he wanted his own work to be “an expression of sensation, rather than as a reflection of environmental appearances.”
In Four Amigos,her painting of horses against a backdrop of the Sandia Mountains, horses and mountains are essential forms and colors, with limited detail.
Light Showers, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.
While painting Rain Sheets Stedham realized that her rendition of the sheets of falling rain looked like sheets hung on a clothesline. Rather than making her representation of the rain more naturalistic, she realized, “You know, if I want to make the rain look like sheets on a line, I can do that. It’s my own unique vision. It’s very freeing. Painting has got to be about freedom. If it’s not about creativity and being free why are we doing it?”
Her latest paintings will be shown in the exhibition West: Real, Imagined at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, July 12 through 26. —
Blue Rain Gallery 544 S. Guadalupe Street » Santa Fe, NM 87501 » (505) 954-9902 » www.blueraingallery.com
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