Kathleen B. Hudson emphasizes dynamic light and atmosphere in her paintings. She is a Signature Member of the Plein Air Painters of America and the second youngest artist ever to be elected a Fellow in the American Society of Marine Artists. In 2017, Hudson received the Grand Prize in the 6th Annual PleinAir Salon for her painting Bright Morning, Timberline Falls, which was featured on the July 2017 cover of PleinAir Magazine. The same month Southwest Art named her an “Artist to Watch.”

The landscape has always been my chief source of artistic inspiration. I love to capture sweeping views of rugged terrain, shimmering waves, and dramatic atmospherics. According to my family, I began painting as soon I was old enough to hold a brush. Oils became my favored medium during middle school, when I painstakingly copied several of John Singer Sargent’s works. I enjoyed an unconventional upbringing and travelled broadly, exploring new terrain and—notably—dozens of art museums. Viewing awe-inspiring places like Yosemite, the Wye Valley in Wales, and Niagara Falls left me with a desire to recreate some of these scenes on canvas.

ARTIST STATEMENT

To this day I try to evoke that same childhood sense of wonder in my landscapes. My paintings represent specific places and moments in time: the brief point during a sunrise when the sun fills the air with an ethereal golden glow; a break in a storm where light pierces through heavy clouds; or the sight of glacial runoff sending waterfalls down the side of a mountain wreathed in fog.

Scenes like this are real, but because my paintings highlight rare moments of particular beauty, they tread a fine line between the “real” and the otherworldly.

What makes a landscape otherworldly or sublime?

The short answer: light and atmospheric movement.

A mountain may become more than just a mountain when you stand beneath it and watch sunlight dance across its slopes’ jagged contours. You listen to the wind whistle overhead as it enters rock crevices and rushes downward; moments later, you feel its breath across your face. The same atmospheric forces that make the mountain arrestingly beautiful—moving light, air, clouds—envelop you, too. You become part of the landscape. It is then that the mountain becomes part of a visual drama that can awaken something within you, filling you with wonder and even longing.

When I envision a new painting, I focus on points of shifting light and atmosphere in the scene. To me, these are the source of a landscape’s beauty: the things that make us stop and look before continuing on our way.

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.”

—C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces