§ July 3 2023
I'm just doing all these blog entries to show the whole last year in paintings. So the next deadline was one month later and it was for the Ragged Edge in Gettysburg, which I do every spring which is really fun because I paint any thing and everything I want, and lots of little ones so they can be more affordable. They are up right now and I'm not sure how much longer they will be, but they've been up for a couple of months. They are usually up for two months, May and June but possibly they will be up a little longer. I've just texted my dear friend and art manager in Gettysburg who hangs my work and stores my paintings to ask her how long. Here are the little ones I sent to her at the beginning of May, and at least a couple of the larger framed ones she put up from her storage
§ July 3 2023
Months before I painted the show for Red Raven I committed to this Art and Soup charity event. I imagined a little booth space like for Farmer's Market and when I finished the Red Raven show I started looking into this event that I'd committed to, and it was very fancy! People have to buy tickets to get in (which goes to this very worthy charity , to help people with medical expenses who otherwise could not afford it. But I realized immediately I would have to fill up a lot more space than I thought, and I just went on super emergency mode, because it was so soon. My strategy was larger paintings to fill up the space, and also I was inspired by some of the paintings I had just done for Red Raven which I love to paint variations on a theme (series) because I'm the type of person that likes to say it agein. I mean with a slightly different view. I do that in conversation too. My husband says, you already said that and I say no, didn't you hear the nuanced difference that time/ I'll say it agains so you can notice haha but anyway I do that. One painting, called "Present Day" was my biggest piece and drew some people from across the room, which was fun for me. It features a our central Utah landscape which I think is a little underpainted by Utah artists....the red rock country is painted a lot. Well it is beautiful but so is our yellow grasses, wild sunflowers and blue brush and trees in these valleys of the Wasatch Mountain Range. I sold several prints of that one which was my other strategy for filling up the space was to get lots of prints. So here are several photos from the CNS Art and Soup event
§ July 3 2023
This is one more for the show at Red Raven. It's called "Angel's Path" The colors I chose were inspired by some stain glass in the Provo City Center Temple. Some of these paintings I did for Red Raven are still available there, if anyone wants to know, and can be located at their website. Look for me, Katheryn Stott Buxton under their 'visiting artists' section. The Red Raven Art Company is on Prince Stree in Lancaster Pennsylvania and their website is redravenartcompany.com. There is a link to them in my menu under 'Shop'
§ July 3 2023
This past winter I had 3 show/event deadlines. It felt like it took everything I had to get ready for them to my own satisfaction. The first one was a featured show for my gallery representation in Pennsylvania at the Red Raven Art Company. I'm extremely emotionally attached to this gallery representation. I love Red Raven, and it's art community. I also show at the Ragged Edge in Gettysburg which I love...it's a fun artsy cafe there a couple of blocks away from the circle crossroads at the center of the town, not too far from the college. So far since I moved to Utah in 2018 I haven't taken the time to acquire gallery representation here, but I've been doing some events the past few years.
But back to what I was working on this past winter, my featured show, I had a theme of movement. The last featured show I did for them back in 2018 was chairs. I wanted to invite people in to sit down, and be reflective...just ponder a minute. So this one I thought I'd invite the viewer in to move through. Each painting featured a path or a road, or something to travel on or through
This one is called "grove" I was contrasting warm and cool greens. In my mind perhaps the difference between sunlight and heavenly sort of otherworldly light. A member of my faith community might ask if this one was inspired by the "Sacred Grove" and the answer is yes very much inspired by it.
I found a black and white photo in a very old National Geographic Magazine at a used book store. I took a photo of the photo which inspired this painting. The painting is small, only 8x10. It's called "Invitation" I hope it's inviting you to embark on a journey. Or maybe remembering when you were just about to.
This one is called 'Over, Under, and Through'. It was inspired by a picture I took of a foot bridge I took while in Big Sur State Park in California. It's interesting how some scenes and images look familiar to just about everyone. So so many people told me it looked like somewhere they had been before, who had definitely not been to this exact spot, that I was painting, in my interpretative way
While I was with my family visiting Pennsylvania I took a photo of my sister and her husband walking down this certain road there. It's called "Home in Harmony" which is a play on words because Harmony is/was also a place. In my mind the light and color is moving with them.
These two are both 20x20 inches square, and are meant to hang side by side in a sort of diptych. There is a place along the Susquehanna River where it is believed that John the Baptist appeared, to give something to two men who there prayed. While standing by this piece of river I was looking at these big trees around me and wondering what they have witnessed over the years. I painted the sides of these scenes in Raw Umber tones and then the centers in color, hoping that this would convey the passage of time.
This one is called "Sidewalk". It isn't really a real place as much as some others are, because I very much used many different photos to make a scene of a quiet city street. I mean to contrast the person walking down a sidewalk with purpose and direction with many other options of movement to the right and the left
This one is called "Windswept" and is inspired by a photo of road near the home in Pennsylvania where we lived for more than a decade
This piece is called "Waters Edge"
This piece is called "Leah's Dream". It's inspired by Lehis Dream which has some of the same elements such as a tree, a river, a field.
§ June 14, 2022
Life is like a river. Flowing along, unstoppable. But lovely. Sometimes rocky. Sometimes dangerous, the rapids of life. But when we look back at it we see the light was always there shining on it. We see the beauty. The Love always there. Often we see that light because of the people in our lives. just right now I want to tell about my children. Who are not children anymore but they are my children who are adults. (We are all children) But anyway I am going to tell you, my blog readers,a little about them. It's the kind of thing people do on Facebook a lot but since I have a bit of Social Media Anxiety I'm Going to do it here where I feel very safe. Thank you Hunter. Hunter my oldest and First Born made this website for me. My grandmother used to tell me that to know what a man is really, watch how he treats his mother. If this is true then my son Hunter is a very very good man because he's just so so nice to me. Like I said he made me this website for me, for Mother's Day, which took him countless hours. He's always considering my feelings and my well-being. He works as a computer programmer, and he co-owns a start up company. He's about 5'6" and won't date anyone taller than him.(If anyone is wondering) He is very artistic in many ways but especially in writing. He likes to rock climb, running, and lifts weights.
Next I'll tell you about Dominique. It's so nice to have a daughter to walk and talk with. You haven't met a sweeter kinder person. She is working on an an English degree at UVU. She has a lot of natural writing talent. (all three of my children are excellent writers. ) She loves to get out and into nature. And isn't she lovely?
Now Trevor. Roger and I would not be back together again without Trevor's help. This is just true. (Roger and I were divorced for 6 years) Right now Trevor is on a mission helping more people. He is in the Dominican Republic for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) We miss him so much but we are so grateful at the same time.
§ June 10, 2022
I am catching up on some of my life for the past year. I'm going to start with last spring and summer, and some family pictures
This is my husband and I and our adult children on a little hike at Albion Basin. Another one we did last summer was Angel's landing. The men did a Spartan race up at that ski resort by Cache Valley which I cannot think of the name right now. We love to enjoy mountains and all kinds of nature together
It was a busy summer, working and trying to appreciate life at the same time. In October our youngest son Trevor left on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He went to the Dominican Republic Santiago. So here is a photos we took just before he left. He is doing so well. We miss him!
So now I'm Going to post a few paintings. The first two are I had up at the Farmer's Market last summer. I made a few friends there who commissioned me to do some paintings which I did after the market was over, during the winter. They were lovely commisions and I really really enjoyed them. The last two here are a couple of mountain River paintings I did for Red Raven Art Company in Pennsylvania
§ April 23, 2021
This painting has been in process for many months. It is one of 2 paintings I entered in the Spring Art Salon at the Springville Museum of Art. There were about 1,000 entries, and of the 250 selected my paintings weren't chosen. That's ok. I'm not daunted, my motivation and drive is still on full throttle.
This one is called This is the Desert of Our Childhood. I think I titled another painting last summer similarly. For me the title conveys my feelings of attachment I have to this landscape, in my very bones...in my DNA really, as this central Utah landscape with it's blue trees, majestic protective mountains, windy bleached and creamy grasses, and dry sweet desert smells are what I'm made of. Both of my great grandparents were called to settle Millard County and my grandparents migrated only a little north, to Utah and Salt Lake County. I've been all over the country and spent almost all of 3 decades in the Eastern states which is also beautiful, and became a part of me but this, this is what's found in my very marrow and I am back home. It's quite large, for me: 30x40 inches. Roger framed it beautifully in Walnut.
This is the the other one I entered in the show. It's a self portrait, literally, on the left at 4 years old, and just me in my family that I grew up in. It's my older brother David jumping out of the swing. He remembers that moment of flight, still. Its about the fluttering moments in time that we pass through, all gifts from a loving Heavenly Father. It's about time, process, and the journey of life. Also 30x40 inches. I hoped that the concepts expressed in this painting are universal and shared by many.
§ February 15, 2021
4th South, East of University Avenue. Just one of many streets built which came into being in the 50's, lined with hipped roofed bungalows and 70 year old trees that have witnessed almost a century of comings and goings in a neighborhood.
The morning light coming through a leafless tree, so beautiful, so peaceful. In the same way I want to paint a forest path or stream I want to paint this street. On my list of groups of paintings I want to do is a series of paintings of domestic dwellings and places where domestic dwellings are.
Almost 30 years ago, in the Fall of 1993, I was newly pregnant and my husband and I were preparing to move from Utah to the East Coast. We had Connecticut in mind because it seemed centrally located to our goals at the time. I came up with a plan to be an immediate self employed artist by painting people's homes. I painted a portrait of a home on an 11x14 piece of plywood, in oil paint. It was a little bungalow style home with lots of green around it...it was my sample painting. My plan was to knock on doors, and ask people if they would like a painting of their home like 'this one'. Then if they said yes I would take a picture, and go home and paint it...with the one step in between which was taking the film to get it developed, since this was in 1994, before cell phone cameras. My plan totally worked, and I painted many paintings of people's homes. I did this through my first pregnancy and then after, too, for about a year, as I put my baby on my back while walking neighborhood streets to drum up work.
I grew to love painting domestic architecture. I learned that anytime I could get some dappled sunlight and shadow on a porch was the best. It felt very much like I was building the homes myself as I laid bricks down one by one with paint, or measured carefully for a window or a door. The problem was that many of the homes that I most wanted to paint were not the ones who accepted my offer, so I have plans to paint scenes of domestic dwellings in the same way I have painted intimate spaces in nature.:)
§ January 30, 2021
2020 will go down in history for so many reasons. Every individual on this planet was affected by the worldwide pandemic, each person in their own individual way. For me last year I was fighting for my life, but not with the Covid 19 Corona Virus. I started the year determined to make what I thought was belly fat, go away. I put myself on a rigorous diet and exercise regime. I was working very hard at it with only a little success, so I pumped up my efforts. I was confused, because my body wasn't responding as it usually does. My arms and upper body were looking a little smaller but my belly didn't seem to be budging. No matter, I thought, and I just exercised harder, adding in core exercises for my belly.
About the same time the pandemic hit, I had what I thought at first was an unusually heavy period. But when it went on for two weeks I thought I should go see a gynecologist finally, but the clinic was closed....remember how everything was closed at first....so the only option was to go to the hospital. But I was afraid to go to the hospital where there were so many people there, with the virus, plus it costs so much more to go to the hospital. So I looked for solutions to stop the bleeding...it was very stressful because it was sometimes more like hemorrhaging. I tried things on the internet but to no avail. I finally found something in one of my herb books at home, a less common herb called Shepherd's Purse. This particular book said it helped women to stop bleeding after delivering a baby, so I thought it was worth a try, so I went to the Natural Food store and finally found it off in a corner in tincture form. It totally worked! I was so relieved. It's so stressful having your life force draining out of you in copious amounts. I hoped that it was actually a grand finale to my periods. I was turning 50 in October, after all. So a couple months went by and spring fully came. I kept working on that stubborn belly...really hard. I was so frustrated with it.
And then I started bleeding again...a tremendous amount. I used the Shepherds Purse again, and it would work, and then I would start bleeding again after a little while. The clinic was accepting patients finally, so I went to the clinic. The doctor who examined me said right away, said that my uterus was enlarged, (I thought...well that explains a lot) and set up an appointment for me to have an ultrasound. She also gave me prescription hormones to stop the bleeding. The ultrasound showed I had fibroids growing, and a biopsy said it wasn't yet cancer.
The bottle of hormones said one a day, 2 if the bleeding wouldn't stop. The bleeding didn't stop until I took 3. I am a person who tries to use natural remedies always so this was hard for me. But it was a strange sensation...so lightheaded all the time, and having this constant bleeding was quite frightening, honestly.
It seemed to me that when the bleeding stopped the fibroids grew twice as fast. Seriously. I was starting to really look and feel pregnant. Also, I think the hormones were causing water retention so I was feeling puffy all over. There was a lot of waiting for the next appointment...all through the summer. Certainly things were taking longer because of Covid.
I was keeping myself very busy painting little tile sized paintings to try to sell at the farmer's market each Saturday, and we managed to do a couple of delightful things as a family...a camping trip and a hike up to the top of Timpanogos. I'm amazed I did that in the state I was in.
I finally had a surgery scheduled and then my surgeon got Covid, and it was delayed again. She recovered and it was October, when it finally happened. I had a hysterectomy of course. I was a bit afraid to go under anesthesia, since I had never done that. I prayed a lot and received a blessing. It was quite traumatizing to my body...the fibroids had grown much larger than the surgeon even expected, (but I knew) and there was something else going on that she didn't know about, with my uterus lining. I won't satisfy you with any more graphic detail in this public forum but her description of what she ended up having to do to get it all out was weirdly satisfying..... so all of my intense suffering was vindicated with her description.
I can't help but think....I would have died without help....I would have bled out...It would have taken my life. I feel I was given more life and it's a blessing from God. Certainly women 200 years ago or more died with this sort of thing and never knew why.
Recovery time was actually wonderful. I was able to be so restful and I had time to think, pray and study that I've never had quite like that....it was awesome. The amazing thing to me after the surgery was how quiet my body was. My very large confused uterus was trying to expel those fibroids, contracting constantly, and now my body is quiet.
I am finally able to hike and run again, so I took this picture of the Bonneville Trail last week. Winter is pretty. life is a blessing. So grateful for life.
§ May 29 2020
The rainbow is so complete, like a musical scale leaving everything resolved and for me feels like coming home. This photograph is for real. I was hiking in Capital Reef I walked around a bend and there was this rainbow, and it took my breath away. One day I’m going to paint from this photo. I love how the shade of sky is different from one side of the rainbow to the other. That’s the way it looked in life, which is how I often paint so to me it was like Heavenly Father was speaking to me in my language. But anyway I’m quite sure the rainbow is the first symbol in recorded history. It was given to Noah almost 5,000 years ago and recorded by Moses around 3,400 years ago.
§ May 16 2020
There is this color: Indigo Blue. I don’t keep it always on my palette because it’s even more expensive than the cadmium colors. But every once in a while a painting is just asking to be glazed with Indigo Blue and I’ve learned to listen to what the painting is asking for. It’s a dialogue.
§ May 15 2020
27 years ago I was working on my final show of my BFA degree, which consisted of highly interpretive paintings about being inside of a forest. The inspiration for this came when I, a desert girl, stepped inside of a rain forest in the Pacific Northwest. What inspired me is how cathedral, or temple like it felt, and the filtered light coming in was so peaceful and beautiful. I have been painting about the light coming into spaces of this world ever since, it is one way I put myself in that peaceful place while I paint.
Because there is clearly much more in this world that we don’t see than what we do see I choose to be highly interpretive, bringing in both abstract elements and references that take the mind out of the allusion of depth to the awareness of other realities. And I just love love mixing paint, and playing with color relationships.
§ May 11 2020
I call this piece ‘Keep Moving Forward’. This pandemic with its quarantine and social distancing has been harder for me than I would have thought it would. I miss feeling the families together, like my church family when we gather, and my extended family all together, and just going into a restaurant, or a store somewhere a and being part of our human family without feeling everyone’s fear of the invisible. I miss the world I took for granted when it was here. But, we need to keep moving forward, taking this world however it comes and working in it and with it, always moving forward in the light, just keeping on keeping on, fighting the good fight! What that looks like today was different than yesterday. Yesterday I got up at 4 am and climbed a mountain. Today I have sore muscles (all worth it) and I’m going to work at home, again, painting, and organizing, hanging with my family, and in particular doing something for/with my daughter because she finally finished this winter semester at college, which she finished at home of course.
§ March 7th, 2020
This is one of the paintings for the the collaborative book project Laura and I have been working on. Here is the poem that the painting is responding to:
The weather is turning into spring, the slant of light is changing. The week went by so fast, but it always does doesn't it? We say that and never get used to it, it seems, because we always say how fast time goes as if we are surprised that it does. Why is this? Is it that our spiritual memories remember an eternity before, and although we knew before we came here that this life would be short, we aren't used to short, and finite?
I'm hoping to get my show for Ragged Edge done, and my entries for the Springville Art Solon, this month. and then at the beginning of April take a couple weeks off of painting to get my garden started. So excited to paint this month. While I paint I'm going to listen listen listen to everything I can think of to immerse myself in the Restoration as President Neilson urged us. Right now I'm listening to the first volume of Saints for the second time.
Trying to lose my winter fat. Uphill battle that, too, since I have to take time off of painting to get exercise)
§ February 28th, 2020
Sometime in the late 70s when I was a young girl, I’m guessing around 6 or 7 years old, I have a vivid memory: I am sitting on a white couch looking at a red carpet, in the home of the first decade of my life, and I am thinking of my existence in an extremely large universe. I am suddenly aware that I am one small person in a very large world filled with so many people, and then infinite space around it all, and I feel fear and anxiety. And then, at some point after that, I chose to embrace a belief that I am a daughter of a creator, who created me as well as everyone else, and that this creator is a loving father, and that I have a spirit inside that lived with him before this mortal existence, and that as children of a creator, we all by nature are creative.
Who I am is part of 4 families that are integral to my view of my relationship with life. I have the family that I was raised in as a child. I have the family that I spend much of my time caring for and making a home for on a daily basis. I am part of a human family which consists of all of my sisters and brothers that live on this earth, and not just laterally but also going forward and backward in time: all who have lived and will live. And then there is the family of living things in every kingdom of life in this very complex ecosystem of the entire planet. I love life. I love light. I love this beautiful Earth and growing things. I love words.
I am first a mother and daughter, and then a sister. I have always felt that my responsibilities as such in my families should take first priority. And yet I have held on to my desire and need to express myself visually as if my life depended on it, as if I would cease to exist if I let go.
I have 3 children, and my youngest is 17. They are joy to me. I’ve been through two hard marriages, and two very painful divorces. I know what it’s like to be a single mother. I’m working on a third marriage to the same man that I was married to the first time, who is also the father of my children. And yet he is not the same man as he was before, and it is a peaceful happy marriage. My life experience tells me that every person has troubles of many different kinds and sorts, as part of this journey of life. Throughout mine there have been 3 things that I feel I have constantly held on to with all of my might: My motherhood, my art, and my dialogue with my Heavenly Father.
This is what I wrote just yesterday for a scholarship I am applying for. The Essay was supposed to be a statement of who I am in 500 words, asking specifically for who I am as an artist, a person, and a mother. So here I am at 49 and 1/2 years old, and it's hope I feel. I'm making the assumption that my life is literally only half over, which means I have half of it left. Yay!
But by far the most meaningful and important things I have are very close friendships with all 3 of my children, who are now no longer children... Hunter 26, Dominique 22, and trevor 17.There are also some things I look back on and regret, and I see how I could have done better. They are too personal to share in this way at this time.
On a less serious note, but still talking about regrets, I have been terrible at documenting my life. I have this website that my awesome son made for me as a mother's day gift, and I asked him to make a place for a blog, which he did, and well there it is...only two blog posts in over 2 years.
So this post is the beginning of the rest of my life, and I am going to be more about sharing, and documenting my growth as a person For the record, I believe that every soul is special and has valuable things to share. We can all learn from eachother.
Here is a picture of a commisioned painting I just finished for a Red Raven customer/client: I titled it, 'Contemplating the Possibilities'
§ December 6, 2017
So to continue from where I left off yesterday I was showing you about this really fun tradition at the Red Raven Art Company. Most of us Red Raven artists did a dozen of this little 4x4 inch paintings. Little paintings are just really fun to do. Lee lovett, the manager at the gallery, who is also a visiting artist there, told me a few days after black Friday that they sold out completely. Everyone is building their own grid at home like that one. Its fun to look at. I could stand there in front of all those little paintings for over an hour, enjoying each one. So here is one of mine. Its on the wall...Its on the fourth row from the bottom. Its the one with the most glare on it, in the picture, but you can still see it enough to tell it's the same one. Five of mine are on the very bottom row, going from left to right, #2, 3, 6, 8, and 10. The rest are scattered around. But the fun thing is that all of the artists have a different vibe and these little paintings tend to be so simple and strait forward, and fun.
So I painted the little scene, right, all of it as one, with the same colors all the way across, in the grass, and sky, etc. And then I thought, how can I break up the space, and make it more interesting? How can I communicate something about something else true, besides the allusion of this little farmhouse in the world? So I glazed one half with yellow and the other half with red. Two very different directions in color. Amazing how different the one side feels than the other. I painted that a couple of months ago, and since then I have done that a few other times, split a painting from top to bottom somewhere, not necessarily in the middle, and made a sort of dichotomy with the colors. Its fun to do. probably because I always think analogous colors next to each other are just as delicious a thing as a thing can be.
§ December 5, 2017
Starting my blog, on my website that Hunter made for me! Hunter is my oldest son of three awesome kids. Hunter is 23 and working on a double major and a minor at BYU. Dominique is 20 and going to school at UVU. Trevor is 15 and a sophomore in high school. They have been my biggest joy in life. They are incidently all three of them amazing writers....a lot better than I am. But I love words, and I love to talk about art and life which is why this website is going to be really fun for me....thank you Hunter! I'm super excited to blog. When I was a young girl I kept a daily journal, and I really enjoyed it. It helped me define myself. I'm afraid too many entries throughout my teenage years were about boys, but not all. I have some scattered writing over my adult years but, I believe there is something very valuable about a daily accounting. This blog is attached to my website which is about me as an artist, but my art is about my expression of life so I'm sure life will come into it.
A very fun blessing for me is my gallery representation in Lancaster Pennsylvania, with the Red Raven Art Company. What a fun art family and group of artists. Lancaster has a wonderful historical downtown with about as many galleries as one city can hold....literally dozens. Every First Friday it seems like everyone in the city is out to look at the new art for the month, and there is music and magic in the streets, and just a wonderful vibe. Red Raven Art Company is located on North Prince Street. It is run and owned by 5 member artists and they have several permanent visiting artists...I'm one of those. You can find me at the visiting artist section of there website. I participate in their group shows in December and January, an I have had 3 featured shows there in the past 6 years. In June of this year I will be showing on the highlight wall. Here is a link about on article written last month: http://lancasteronline.com/features/entertainment/get-ready-for-red-raven-s-annual-art-everyone-show/article_b8ba9616-ce1e-11e7-8c8b-2b32a7bcf021.html
It was about the art 4 everyone wall they put up every Black Friday. What it is is a grid of 4x4 inch paintings. Here is a picture of this year's grid:
