About
Kathy Halbower took a life drawing class in her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, in the spring of 1972 when she was 20. That fall, as a junior at Kenyon College, she began drawing and then painting. She never stopped.
Drawing from live models, still lives, memory, imagination, feeling, or riffing on a photograph provided subject matter for her painting. Her less colorful, monochromatic representational work, sometimes raw, was her response to what she saw as decorative, unserious art. Non-representational work came mainly through color studies first made at Kenyon, encouraged by her teacher, Joseph Slate, who had studied with Joseph Albers at Yale.
As she learned more about environmental issues and biophilia, she began to focus on the natural world. After reading about the therapeutic benefits of exposure to art depicting nature, she chose plants, landscapes, water and sometimes people or animals as her main subjects.
Her color study series made over many decades inspire her representations of nature in paintings ranging in size from 8 feet by 12 feet to 8 inches by 8 inches. In many of the smaller paintings, she includes an image of a painter at work to convey scale and handmade art. Since the early 1980s, following advice from friend and art conservator, Suki Fredericks, she has used high quality, permanent materials properly applied.
Halbower’s teachers at Kenyon were Joseph Slate, Dan Fleckles and Richard Baronio. At UC Irvine, she was teaching assistant to Joan Snyder and Craig Kauffman. She was represented by Betty Asher, Patti Faure and Sam Freeman in Los Angeles and Barbara Toll in New York City.
She lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.
Education
University of California at Irvine
Master of Fine Arts
1977
Kenyon College
Bachelor of Arts - Ryerson Painting Prize
1974
Exhibitions
1975
Tarrant County Annual
Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, Group Exhibition
1976
Southern California Drawings
University of Hartford, Hartford, CT, Group Exhibition
1977
Master of Fine Arts
University of California Irvine
1979
Janus Gallery
Venice, CA, Group Exhibition
1979
Asher/Faure Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, Group Exhibition
