Kathryn Stotler
My parents, musicians in southern California, exposed me to the arts, but at no time growing up, did I expect to become an artist.
I did however embrace a gnawing need to create new things out of my environment.
I was a headstrong and private child, preferring to play alone and explore my surroundings at will.
We visited southern California’s beaches nearly every weekend.
Some times my father would pack us up and head to the desert, armed with a home made telescope for stargazing.
During the summers we traveled to northern beaches.
I would plunge into the waters, warm or cold, loving how it slipped over my skin.
Expanses of glittery sand and strange rock formations in both arenas begged me to investigate them.
I believed these were magical places so I picked up stones, shells, and bits of wood and organized them into patterns and collections.
They were my private talismans that kept the mystery and joy of the beaches and deserts alive when I had to go back to school.
It was during these trips that I fell in love with the sounds, smells, and the feel of the natural world, as well as the silence that deep, starry nights can bring.
As an adult, I struggled to feel passionate about any profession and I had many.
From educator to realtor to landlady.
I worked with textiles for fifteen years and collage for two.
But that pesky need to create, to tell a different story, left me with an aching sense that I needed to explore further.
Some years ago I signed up for a drawing class.
I convinced the teacher to show me painting.
My beginnings were cryptic, exploratory, and experimental but they involved going to our extraordinary shoreline with brushes, paint, and canvas.
The only instruction was to paint what I saw.
So I consider myself to be a self-taught abstract landscape painter, now living here in the northwest where I have nurtured a personal relationship with my sense of place in the natural, raw world. Its changing energies, the beauty of wide open spaces and precarious waters has become my full time inquiry and painting exploration.
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