The Art of Kathryn Gastelum
During her college years, Kathryn Gastelum studied Studio Art and Art history in Paris, France, through the Southern Methodist University program, a program offered through the University of Arizona. While there, she also took the opportunity to travel to other parts of Europe. Through these experiences, she has had the good fortune of seeing and experiencing a wide spectrum of art, leaving an indelible mark on her creative output.
Her painting career began with realism, including subjects such as Parisian bookshops and bistros, inspired by the Fauvists, and rendered in a style reminiscent of Matisse. They are "trés charmant" and evoke happy memories. The artist continues to paint in this style, although she confesses that they are mostly created for her own collection. She believes that this style of painting keeps her work fresh and her skills sharp.
Another group of paintings created in a realistic style are the "Sand Dunes." Kathryn was born in Arizona and has always had an attraction to sand. But not only with the desert that surrounds her. This attraction involves sand dunes from distant lands in the Middle Eastern landscape. It is the Saharan desert that inspires her, where vast vistas and horizons extend beyond the human eye. In her sand dune paintings, she revels in the drifts of sand, where the colors and mood of these paintings offer a sense of calm. For the artist, these are poetic environments, and that mood is reflected in their titles, such as Mystic Sand and Sahara Sundown.
Over the last twelve years, Kathryn has been painting in an abstract style. Abstract painting can be a "push-pull" experience. For Kathryn, it begins with layering color on top of color, scraping and adding while turning the canvas until she is satisfied with the result. In creating these background surfaces, she feels a kinship to painters such as Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler, and Rothko. This carefully prepared surface becomes the framework for the final composition.
While playing jazz music in her studio, and in an act of pure spontaneity, she enhances the canvas with shapes. But what of these shapes? The line work may suggest geometry, but on closer inspection, one quickly realizes these are not symmetrical shapes. What, then, is the intention of these marks? The answer to that mystery harkens back to Kathryn’s fascination with sand. In an interesting twist, the artist discovered that a grain of sand, when observed under a microscope, can have a variety of shapes. They are organic shapes in various forms, including sub-rounded and angular. On her canvas, these organic shapes coalesce beautifully with their respective backgrounds. Thinking back on moments in time, whether a beautiful memory, or simply something she saw, she draws on that inspiration to extract a mood in this large body of abstract works.
Prior to learning about this unique connection to sand, we instantly saw a relationship between her sand dune paintings and one particular abstract canvas (although there are others.) You may also be able to see that connection with, "On the Lookout," centered on a wall with two sand dune paintings on each side. This placement is helpful for us to understand the continuity of her themes, and appreciate how this artist extracts her impressions and interprets them differently through the continuum of time.
Armed with a thorough understanding of this artists lyrical paintings, we are reminded that through history sand has been a method of measuring time. It is through Kathryn Gastelum's powerful and moving abstract canvases with organic shapes, that we are reminded of the rhythm of life and the moving sands of time.
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