Artist’s Statement

I spent most of 2020 and almost all of 2021 so far exploring how to be - in a world that is upended - through drawing. I’m interested in imagined landscapes and unstructured moments in time, places of safety and repose, expressed through color blocks and fields. I have lately been using colored pencil exclusively, really trying to stretch its use beyond its roots in illustration. I am challenged to create expressive images using a very fussy medium. No solvents are used in my work; instead, colors are layered and layered and left undisturbed to create new hues through optical mixing. I burnish my drawings with an old t-shirt to remove individual marks and create a smooth surface - nearly matte but more painterly than something like gouache - that is at once active and restful

Biography

Kate Boyd is an emerging artist rededicated after years away to her practice. She excelled in art classes as a child and in community colleges before attending the Kansas City Art Institute for two years. She left the Institute, and, temporarily, art, for California where she lived for 20 years before returning to her home town of St. Louis, Missouri in 2010. She has always made art, taking continuing education classes here and there, dabbling in this or that, and for years focused mostly on processing, dyeing and spinning wool and other fibers into unique and colorful yarn. She returned to a serious practice in two dimensional work in early 2019, when she joined a group of resident artists at Concrete Ocean Studios and Gallery in St. Louis. The pandemic had her creating from a space on her family’s sofa, with materials that could be put away tidily at the end of the day. In this limited space and with limited materials, she found a strong and different voice.

Curriculum Vitae

1987-89 - Attended Kansas City Art Institute, with a focus on painting and printmaking
1994 - Muralist, Local 506, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2012 - Group show, pop-up gallery, St. Louis, Missouri
2019-Present - Resident Artist, Concrete Ocean Studios and Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri. Several group shows
2019 - Group Show, Mangia Restaurant, St. Louis, Missouri. One piece displayed in the space until it closed in 2020, due to the pandemic.
2021 - Group Show, Inner Power Virtual Exhibition, Art Queen Inaugural Members - https://artqueens.co/inner-power-exhibition

Private Collection - Santa Cruz, CA
Private Collection - Eden Prairie, MN
Private Collection - St. Louis, MO