Kathleen Gray-Farthing
Kathleen Gray Farthing just can’t seem to go anywhere without seeing a painting around the next bend... It may be a rhythmic string of telephone poles along the highway, a glowing light falling on an old hay wagon or a breathtaking vista overlooking the ocean—these are the patterns and colors that attract her eye and inspire her to create. And these are the qualities she strives to share with her viewers so they can see and feel what she does. “I want people to be as awed as I am, as amused, as delighted, as fascinated,” she notes. “That’s the challenge, as well as the pleasure, of painting.”
To help focus attention on the unique and glorious qualities of a subject, Kathleen employs a style described as contemporary impressionism. “Impressionism” refers to the fact that she works primarily outdoors, much as the original French and American Impressionists did, endeavoring to capture the distilled essence of the place, a fleeting moment. “Contemporary” hints at her modern approach to accentuating shapes and patterns while pushing the rich, chromatic colors on her palette. The result is a style that is neither wholly representational nor entirely abstract, but a beautiful, joyous combination of the two.
Viewing her environment with the eyes of an artist is a habit Kathleen seems to have been born into. “I’ve just always had a need to create art of one kind or another,” she recalls. Even as a small child, she loved to make detailed drawings, and as a teen, her mother introduced her to oil painting. Participation in a summer fine arts program for high school students at the Maryland Regional Center for the Arts was followed by a series of Saturday figure drawing classes with adults at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I always felt a bit out of place,” she says, “until I was surrounded by people who saw the world in a similar way I did, people who also had a passion for art.”
Through these two programs, Kathleen says she began to create her first “real” art and to develop her portfolio, which enabled her to land invitations to study art at three universities. Ultimately, she chose to attend Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “When I visited CMU, I immediately fell in love and knew that’s where I wanted to go to school,” she recalls. “The day I visited, the sun had just come out after a rain. There were students playing frisbee, artists sketching under a tree, and flute music drifting out of the fine arts building.” Once again, Kathleen felt surrounded by like-minded people, and finding her tribe assured her she’d found the right place to study.
Feeling a need to be somewhat practical in her career choices, Kathleen opted to take classes she hoped would open doors in the commercial art field. She had a vision of herself as an artist who would earn a living from graphic design and illustration while creating fine art according to her own interests. After earning a B.F.A in Printmaking and Crafts, marrying, and moving to Ohio with her new husband, Kathleen found herself juggling the demands of parenting three young children with owning and operating her own graphic design business. She found plenty of fulfilling creative outlets in the years that ensued—particularly photography and community theater—but painting fell by the wayside. When her youngest left for college, Kathleen recognized it was time to get back to her first love.
Once she decided to return to her studio and pick up her brushes and palette again, oils seemed to be the natural choice. From an old college friend, Ed Cahill, she heard about the process of painting landscapes outdoors on location, or “en plein air,” and she decided to give it a try. One taste of plein air painting was all it took for her passion to ignite! “There is just something about painting outside for me, especially near moving water,” she notes. “I think I could go through all my paintings and tell you a story about each one. Whether it was hot or cold, whether the wind was blowing, if the bugs were biting, even what it smelled like. Plein-air painting is a total sensory experience, and I simply become immersed in the scene. I come to know each place in a way that’s like no other.”
Since then, Kathleen has devoted herself to mastering the specialty of plein air painting by studying with some of the luminaries in this arena, including Lori Putnam, Joshua Been, Howard Friedman, John P. Lasater IV, and Debra Joyce Dawson. She has participated in dozens of prestigious group exhibitions and juried plein air painting events, such as the Plein Air Convention and Expo, Lighthouse Plein Air Festival, Paint it, Annapolis, Artists on Location: Knoxville, the Finger Lakes Plein Air Competition, and the Parrsboro Plein Air Competition, where she has won a number of awards. Kathleen is a member of the American Impressionist Society, Oil Painters of America, the Ohio Plein Air Society. Some of her work can be seen at the Hudson Framing and Fine Art Gallery.
With such an obvious passion for experiencing the true nature of a place through creative endeavors, it’s no surprise that Kathleen enjoys traveling and is eager to combine her love of plein air painting with her interest in places around the globe, from the familiar to the exotic. She plans to tour and work at many destinations throughout the United States—especially at national parks—and beyond, with Cuba being her last big adventure before COVID. In May of 2022, she'll explore Portugal with Nancy Tankersley. When she’s not on the road or out painting on location, Kathleen has learned to love still life painting as well, with guidance from Kelli Folsom.
Her biggest joy will always be her family, with her toddler grandsons bringing many smiles.