Kathryn Whitten

Art that deeply contemplates landscape is of vital importance in our current era. Landscapes contribute to the idea of an American consciousness that is built on recognition of our shared reliance on the land. This shared reliance is what makes each person who lives on this soil truly interconnected.

My name is Kathryn Whitten and I am an artist from Point Reyes Station, California. I am what Wallace Stegner calls a “nester.” I love my home. It took a lot of my willpower to move away for college so that I could study painting and printmaking in New York City at Columbia University. Since returning from New York, I have worked as an educator and a National Park Ranger.

My art is a devotional practice that honors my belonging to the land of the American West. It contemplates how we understand our relationship to the land, and thereby each other, and how we can honor it as sacred. I utilize my personal visual vocabulary of the holy to depict the landscape. Repetition plays a central role in my practice. It arises from an understanding of repetitive and focused attention as a spiritual impulse. My bodies of work become like prayers made material.

Materiality is a central feature in my practice. I experiment and play my way through various materials including painting, silk, wood, paper, printmaking, and drawing. I enjoy that this approach keeps my art forever deeply materially engaged. I am not aiming to settle on a singular way of working but rather to always be experimentally moving towards something just out of reach. My art is a form of devotion through play that requires acute attention and engagement.

The American West is of particular importance in this exploration because of my personal belonging to it. I have grown up and built my life out West and have been inevitably shaped by it. I seek to faithfully depict the conditions of light and color that make this place particular. I depict scenes that suggest intimacy rather than transaction: trees lit by moonlight or hills covered in fog in the early morning. I am not simply a recreator here, enjoying memories of sunny days on the beach, but someone whose life is built here day by day, someone whose soul and body, whose family, community, and country are dependent on the well-being of this place. These scenes are intentionally subtle and often require close attention from the viewer to be able to really see what is being depicted. They offer a space to slow down and commit attention.

My art seeks to further respect for American land. I believe our current environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual and philosophical crisis. My practice seeks to explore how we might structure our lives and beliefs differently if we were to honor our connection to land.