{"id":441,"date":"2010-02-03T01:59:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T07:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2010\/02\/03\/kathryn-stedham\/"},"modified":"2023-11-04T14:41:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T20:41:00","slug":"kathryn-stedham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/kathryn-stedham\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathryn Stedham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s often said that every artist can recall an early, transformative encounter with art or art-making. Often it emerges from the mist of childhood sensations as the first clear memory. In Seoul, South Korea, it was the tail end of the 1960s when Kathryn Stedham was born to a Korean mother and an American father, a G.I. stationed there after the hot war turned cold. When they soon moved to Georgia, though, and later to Virginia, the U.S. was still in the middle of the time warp of cultural upheaval we remember as the Sixties. At four, an age when most children are likely to eat their crayons or scribble on a wall, while national attention was focused on the Watergate scandal, Stedham remembers her grandfather giving her a piece of paper the size of a rug, on which she sat, absorbed in drawing his portrait. Someone pointed out that she\u2019d omitted his glasses, and she quickly drew them in. \u201cAren\u2019t you a good little artist,\u201d he praised her, and although the words were new to her and she wasn\u2019t sure what they meant, that moment forged an indelible connection between the world\u2019s appearance, her response, and an audience. She never forgot how that felt, or deciding right then to be an artist.<\/p>\n

If the broad outlines of this story of self-discovery are familiar, other memories hint of something darker about becoming an artist. In Korea, Stedham\u2019s mother had been part of an affluent and influential family. In Georgia, she was isolated, struggling to adapt her traditional lifestyle to alien circumstances. Stedham recalls watching her hang fresh fish from a clothesline to dry, an experiment that failed in the humid air. The solitude and self-reliance she endured probably prepared her daughter for the life she lives today, where in spite of their common interests she and her partner, the popular landscape painter Gregory Stocks, spend their working hours as artists must, apart in their separate studios.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also likely that as she watched her parents merge and realign their lives into a family\u2014a universal struggle made more challenging by choice\u2014the little student artist was discovering the importance of point of view, of placement and perspective, in how each individual experiences the world. Isolation drew the family together, and her mother reciprocated her attention by insisting that the family\u2019s activities be as inclusive as possible. Instead of the motorcycle races her dad favored — dangerously anarchic events that required leaving the children in the car for their own safety — mom suggested they buy a sailboat she\u2019d seen in a store window: something they could all enjoy. A sequence of larger boats followed, until when Kathryn was twelve they were living on a 36-foot Catalina. \u201cI grew up on the water,\u201d she says, her eyes sparkling like sunlight off the ripples: \u201cMy childhood was spent on the bow of a boat, drawing and watching as we came into harbor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps unknown to her, Stedham was learning to construct visual metaphors of her experiences from nature. In time, as the natural world became her passion, those metaphors became more self-referential. If her first subject was that quintessential emigrant experience of entering a new place from the sea, in time it would be the restless departure and return of the tides, the ceaseless movement of clouds hurrying somewhere else, or the turning of the seasons like a great clock marking the year\u2019s hours. She became an enthusiastic hiker who found it hard to turn back, certain that some wonder lurked just around the next turn, waiting for her eyes to discover it or her pencil to reveal it. Incautious in her pursuit, she would be caught working on a beach in Thailand, the day after Christmas in 2004, when the catastrophic tsunami struck. Like millions who also barely survived, she lost everything: her studio and its contents swept away. A canvas from 2005, titled \u201cConcerning Tides,\u201d may indirectly respond to those events. Stretched atop a streaked green field, a band of brown, gray, and white marks march across the canvas, surrounded by a cloud-like yellow band. Usually Stedham suppresses the accidental pictorial bits that emerge from the layers of paint that build up as she paints, but here she allows her brush to suggest figures standing just beyond the limits of perceptual grasp. To one viewer they might suggest vacationers obscured by the glare of a sunny beach. To another they could be survivors comforting each other, or something worse: the lost, separated from living witness by an impassable void.<\/p>\n