"We hold properties of the surrounding environment within us. Nature is interactive and we are interconnected with nature. We are inseparable from the atmosphere as it moves through us. We see, we breathe, we hear, and we feel. As an artist I feel compelled to put down in my paintings my visual perceptions of long-remembered feelings about such atmospheric forces from my own life growing up on a beach, and living, as I do now, in a valley at the base of a mountain.
Environmental information cycles through us daily informing us about ourselves and our relationship with the surrounding natural world. In painting these atmospheric works on panel I continue a dialogue about such things with myself. Transitioning hues of oil color drift across and down the panels to disappear behind horizons, falling into land and sea. The air is water and water becomes air. The illusion of evaporation and condensation hangs in a horizontal balance above and below only to be contained by land mass capturing its elusive shadows of light and color at the outer edges of the compositions. Dark rises to light and the light returns into the motion of tidal flow and shoreline breaks at the water's edge.
What we observe in our surrounding natural world we can then feel in the presence of its atmospheric flow. In sharing our observations about such phenomena with each another, we open ourselves to new ways of seeing and the possibility of a deeper understanding of how we share these powerful forces that nature holds over, around, and within us all.
Something that makes me the happiest is when friends or collectors tell me they saw something in nature that reminded them of my paintings. There can be no higher compliment than to know that I have made such a connection and that people are willing to return that gift to me." - Katheryn Holt
