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“The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are:
Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.”
---Elizabeth Bishop American Poet Laureate 1949-1950
Kathy Hirsh has been an artist for as long as she can remember. Her passion for painting engages her senses to create beautiful works awash in color and light.
Born and raised in the American Midwest, Kathy was surrounded by a flat landscape and long winters that at times seemed absent of color. An award-winning medical illustrator for 25 years, Kathy worked primarily in black and white. Perhaps this explains her intense attraction to saturated colors and to exotic locales like the red rocks of Utah, the russet marshes of Mongolia and golden hay fields of France.
A world traveler and adventurer, Kathy has lived in Nepal and now resides in China.
“Whether it is monasteries in Bhutan, religious ceremonies in India or vineyards in Sonoma Valley, I am privileged to paint en plein aire in remarkable destinations,” she said. “Going out with my backpack and easel, I strive to capture the stunning color, the light quality and the juxtaposition of form and atmosphere in the landscape.”
Before living abroad, Kathy spent years in hospital operating rooms, illustrating complicated surgical procedures for textbooks. “While not exactly coffee table books, I was a best seller on the surgical textbook circuit,” she muses. “It is sort of being like a courtroom artist, but the defendant is anesthetized.”
Kathy has transferred her knowledge and decades of experience illustrating the amazing human body into beautiful pastel landscapes. In much of her landscape work, the human element is always present. “I’m drawn not necessarily to the grand vista, but to the local color and touch of the local people on the landscape,” she said. “
“I work from the general to the specific, first laying down an abstract watercolor or oil wash. I then create a complex multilayered surface with numerous applications of pastel. I’m pushing to accurately capture the mystery I feel standing in these gorgeous settings with spontaneous applications of color”.
Kathy earned her master’s degree in Biocommunication Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She obtained her B.A. from Indiana University, Bloomington, majoring in painting and botany (ferns to be specific).
In the last 5 years she has studied portraiture and landscape painting with Daniel Green, Anthony Ryder, Albert Handell, David Schwindt and Mike Malm.
She lives with her husband and son, in Beijing, China.
Recent awards and juried competitions
• Scottsdale Artists School---2008 Beaux Arts Festival Fresh Paint category
• The Richeson 75: Small Works Exhibition 2008
• National Association of Women Artists Small Works Exhibition 2008
• Artist Magazine 2007 annual art competition featured calendar artist
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