exhibition

February 5, 2016 by Kat

A Key Skill for the Artist

My #30edits series is on display! Less than a month after finishing, I get to share this fun project with my community. It will be on display at the Art in the Valley Gallery through March 5. Reception is Thursday, February 18, 4-8pm during the Corvallis Arts Walk. I hope you will stop by.

It is always fun to get my work into the world, but I won’t deny, it takes a lot of work and advance planning. Getting your art into the world is not just a matter of creating and framing the artwork. It takes effort to seek out opportunities to share the art, apply for them, prepare for them, create required marketing materials (artist statement, show statement, bio), and promote the exhibition/event/fair/workshop/book through my channels (blog, social media, newsletter). And you can’t do this one time and call it good. You have to do it constantly.

Honestly, I think one of the most important skills required to be a successful artist (if you define “successful” as getting your art out into the world) is the “advance planning” piece. At least it is for me, with a full time corporate job and a teenager in high school, I’m always looking at my calendar… To next week, to see what art events I can squeeze in to build my network. To next month to see what I need to prepare, and what time I have to prepare it in. To a couple months out, to see what’s coming that requires a longer lead time. To six or eight months out, to see what I want to have on my calendar, what I need to apply for. This doesn’t happen by magic. It happens by intention.

And I don’t do enough. I can see, if I spent MORE time on this advance planning piece, I could have even more opportunities to share my work. I limit my options by the time I’m willing and able to spend.

I hope, if you are an artist who wants to share your work, this doesn’t discourage you. I hope, instead, it encourages you. You have a lot of power in creating opportunities to share your art. It starts by looking at the future, and planning ahead.

January 28, 2016 by Kat

A View of Dublin

Last week was a whirlwind trip to Dublin, Ireland for my corporate job. The week was busy with meetings and dinners and travel, but I did manage to squeeze in a day and a half of exploring the city over the weekend before heading home. Here are a few images of this great city. I hope to get back very soon!

I started out wandering the streets… Yes, Starbucks is everywhere.

My favorite thing is finding interesting scenes on streets and back alleys. Oh, and bicycles. Mission accomplished in the Temple Bar area!


Wandering into Trinity College is like pausing for a deep breath in the middle of the busy city.

I saw the Book of Kells (no pictures allowed) and the amazing old library. A true book lover’s dream, that library. I stayed in there for a while, just soaking up the feel and the smell of the place.

Midday I met up with my friend Tom who recently moved from Corvallis to Ireland. Together we wandered some more, me always looking for interesting scenes, sometimes dragging Tom across streets and down alleys.

Eventually we found our way to the National Gallery to take in a Turner exhibition, and then met up with some other new friends from work. We went to this amazing Italian restaurant, where I had the best gnocchi since living in Italy. Mmmmm.

Meeting and connecting with people through work is one of the more wonderful parts of business travel. While I often don’t have much time for outside exploring and socialization, the connections with the people I work with, sometimes extending to their families and friends, makes the experience of the place so much richer than when you visit solely as a tourist. I’ve learned to always take up offers to meet for a meal, or a walk, or to see a sight that is important to the culture or a shared interest. My experience of a place is so, so much richer.

Before heading out to the airport, I managed to squeeze in a visit to Kilmainham Gaol, learning more about the history of Ireland in the process.

And a quick visit to the Irish Museum of Modern Art as well. This 1937 Salvador Dali painting, Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds, was part of a temporary exhibition on love. Not a big fan of surrealism, this is one of the few Dali paintings I have ever liked.

My favorite exhibition was Nick Miller and the studio of Edward McGuire. In 2009, Irish painter Edward McGuire’s widow donated 130 items from his studio to the museum. To “avoid a detached, museological approach” of displaying and explained the studio contents, artist Nick Miller researched and reinterpreted the items through his own work. It was exceptionally interesting and well done. I don’t have any good pictures of this exhibition unfortunately, but there is some additional information you can explore online.

Then it was off to the airport to discover one of my flights had been cancelled due to the weather on the east coast, and to be rerouted I would have to leave the following day. A small glitch in plans, an extra night in an airport hotel, and I made it home safe and sound.

And speaking of safe and sound… Patrick and Brandon were in a car accident while I was gone. It was a hit and run, the other drivers fault. They walked away without a scratch, but my car is likely totaled.

Scary all around, but makes you realize what is truly important in life: It’s people, always people. Everything else is secondary.

November 6, 2015 by Kat

Connected through the Camera

If you’ve lost a loved one, you know how much photography matters. These little slices of time we capture in photographs are sometimes all that is left behind of a person.

My father passed away twenty years ago this year in December. He was 51 years old, and it was sudden. An accident. One day he was there and the next day gone. My family and I have our memories of him, a few sentimental items (the guitar being a big one), and some photos. My father was 21 in the photograph Brandon is holding.

Seeking Similarities: Eli 1965, Brandon Eli 2015

My son, now fourteen, never met his Grandpa Eli. He only knows him through me. The stories I tell, the name I gave him, the photos I have to share. I’ve tried to help him know this missing grandfather, this person who meant so much to me, but it’s hard. My dad will never be fully real to my son. I can only give him snippets and impressions. A 2D portrait instead of the 3D person.

When the PhotoArts Guild picked the theme of “Life and Death” for our biennial exhibition, it was a chance to go outside my tree-lined comfort zone and create an image that was personal. Something that speaks to the loss of death and the continuation of life. Life always goes on after loss. Always.

Nothing expresses that quite so much as the parent-child relationship. My father to me to my son. Here, in this image, three generations are connected through the camera lens. Across space and time, there is still a connection. A photograph can remind us of that.

The “Life and Death” exhibition of the Willamette Valley PhotoArts Guild is up through December 11, 2015 at LaSells Stewart Center Giustina Gallery on the Oregon State University campus. My photograph received a “Special Mention” from Julia Bradshaw, the director of the Oregon State University photography program.

December 4, 2014 by Kat

Paris, anyone?

Hey, will you by chance be in Paris today or tomorrow? Yes, I mean Paris, France.

If so, you can catch my art in Création (Photographique) Mobile, a digital exhibition being presented at L’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, (Paris), during the international symposium “Arts and Mobiles.”

I am very excited and honored to have been included in this curatorship. The show includes a wonderful range of creative art from mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and even drones. I encourage you to review the selected work here.

“From one season to another” is the piece on display. It’s really funny to me how these things sometimes happen. It’s all in the timing… I just recently created a new technique, combining apps to get this interesting painterly outline/bleed effect. I just happened on the call to artists when I was looking around for something else. I just happened to have a few minutes to send off an application.

And now my work is being shown in Paris! I am a bit floored by the whole thing.

I’ve continued to explore this technique, trying it with different types of images. You can see a few in my Flickr Photostream. I like it with these specific autumn tree images best. There is something about the beautiful color variation that is achieved, the vibrant combination of yellows, greens and reds, along with the delicate structure in the leaves which really clicks for me.

I look at this recent work and think how far I’ve come in my art over the past few years. If my three-year-ago self ran into this piece, she wouldn’t recognize it as her own. I could not have foreseen this direction, this work. I could only experience it along the way; observe it real time.

Too bad I can’t observe it from Paris this week! 🙂

October 4, 2014 by Kat

Come Visit Local 14

I am in the Local 14 Art Show and Sale this weekend at the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon. If you are out and about, stop by and see my work!

This show is comprised of some amazing women artists in all mediums from Oregon and the Pacific NW. Yesterday I was talking to a fiber artist who came all the way from Boise!

It’s a perfect way to start your holiday shopping. Remaining hours of the show are 10am to 5pm today (Saturday) and Sunday. If you want to meet me, I’ll be working at the show from 12-5pm on Sunday. I would love to connect with you!

August 28, 2014 by Kat

Let’s Talk Mobile Photography

When you are in the middle of something, you don’t always notice how it looks from the outside. I have to keep reminding myself of this fact, as I talk to people about the possibilities of mobile photography in conjunction with the Expanding Vision exhibition. Most people don’t know that you can make art with a smartphone. Most people don’t realize that they have this amazing creative device in their pockets. We get so wrapped up in our little world, talking and working with others doing the same thing, that we forget that most people don’t know what we are doing in this mobile phtoography world.

And so it’s fun, really fun, to get to be part of showing them.

Yesterday I was interviewed by the Corvallis Gazette-Times newspaper as part of a story on the exhibition and mobile photography. I got to talk about my experience with mobile photography, how the idea for the exhibition came about and what I learned from my view from the “inside” of an exhibition. Even though almost none of that was part of it in the end, it was a fun experience and a very nice article! You can read it here.

Oregon Art Beat also came to Corvallis to film a piece on the exhibition. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet them – I couldn’t get away from my day job – but I look forward to seeing the piece. I’ll post that link when it’s available, too.

AND… we’ve added another date for the Intro to Mobile Photography workshop in conjunction with the exhibition. It will be on Saturday, September 20 and registration is here. The first class was last Saturday and I had 12 lovely participants, who are all taking the excitement for mobile photography back home with them! This three-hour class is a great way to get started playing around with your mobile device camera.

Finally, today is the Brown Bag Art Talk for the Expanding Vision exhibition at The Arts Center, 700 SW Madison in Corvallis. I’ll be there! Come and talk mobile photography with a number of the artists in the show. It should be fun!

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