 Good afternoon and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am your host, Melinda Moulton, and today I am speaking with Kathleen Colb. She is an artist and educator and a renowned, internationally renowned painter. So Kathleen, thank you so much for being with me today. Well, thank you, Melinda. That's a little over the top in terms of praise. I might be renowned in certain counties of Vermont, but anyway, I have had an impact and as have you and it's a delight to get to speak with you. Well, thank you so much. I know it's amazing because when I interview artists, they're always so understated about their work and about who they are. There's a level of humility and humbleness that artists have that I really honor, but you truly, and we're gonna get into this story for my viewers are really about how well-known your work is. So let's start at the beginning. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood? Let's see. I was a child. I was a child in Cleveland. I was the eldest of five and then when I was 20, my parents had a sixth who is wonderful and lives here in Vermont, my youngest sister. I had great good fortune of living near the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art, which is a regular art school and enjoyed the luxury really. And I don't know how my parents put it together, but they did of spending Saturday mornings either in classes at the museum or in classes at the Institute. So I had a lot of exposure early and was certain of what I was gonna do early. My high school art teacher was wonderful. So I went from, I knew I was gonna go to art school and my parents and all of us, the seven of us at that time, moved to New Jersey, my senior year of high school and that sort of set the stage for going on further in my education. At what age did your parents recognize that you had a gift in art? I think teachers started telling them I was a little different when I was five. Well, and that was kindergarten, right? That was the first school, the first time somebody outside the family had a chance to sort of assess. I think the story was that the teacher, the kindergarten teacher told the class to draw a picture of spring and everybody drew pictures of tulips and daffodils, except me, I drew a bear coming out of a cave. It was just a slightly different take on the world and alerted the teacher. You still have that drawing? No, all of those. I mean, with six kids and many moves, my mother didn't save. Your parents had, well, I'm surprised it's not stuck on their refrigerator, but you come from a family of six children. Yes. Yes. And where do you land in that family? I'm the eldest. You're the oldest. I'm the responsible one, sort of. I'm the trailblazer and the responsible one. Wow, well, that explains quite a bit. So you talked about your art teacher, but who else in your life, or maybe it was your art teacher, who was your inspiration to pursue art? Let's see. Well, our teachers were great, but I just knew what I wanted to do. I loved making images. I loved creating illusions. I wanted things to be real. I can remember really studying Andrew Wyeth paintings by the time I was 15 and 16. I can remember, I spent a lot of time in the museum. So a lot of the inspiration came from dead artists, long dead artists. I mean, I loved the antiquities too, the Egyptian things and the Jados and the Delorobias. I mean, it was all over the map. The Cleveland Museum is an extraordinary collection. What a much renowned. So I had that and didn't really realize, I can remember playing hide and seek among the sarcophagi with my pals who were also being picked up by mothers and we were waiting. It was a place of comfort for me. The museum has always been a place of comfort and familiarity, which I think it might be different than it is for a lot of people. Well, let's share with our viewers your website because I want them to visit your website. It's really a beautiful website, beautifully done. It's basically Kathleen Colb, K-A-T-H-L-E-E-N-K-O-L-B.com and I encourage my viewers to visit Kathleen's website. It's beautiful. Now, Kathleen, your work has been represented by New York Galleries. You've had over 40 solo shows and 90 group shows in New York and New England. Your work speaks for itself. It's beautiful and brilliant, but your success is one that many artists aspire to achieve. At what point in your life did you realize that you were a nationally acclaimed artist? Well, I still wouldn't call myself that, but I guess this is really funny when you think about it because Vermont is a small pond but that's one of the great things about it for people who, for all of us really because we have access to each other. So it was definitely a turning point for me when I was in my mid 30s, early 30s and Vermont Life wanted to do a piece. So Tom Slayton came to my house and gave him lunch. He came with the then art director Mason Singer of Laughing Bear Associates. We were all a great deal younger then, but that felt to me like a giant leap into celebrity, but Vermont Life Magazine is not exactly international acclaimed, but that was certainly a moment for me of feeling like I had some exposure that gave me a bigger audience and I really appreciated that. Well, I've interviewed artists who say, oh, well, my work will never be, and accomplished artists, they will, my work will never be exhibited in New York and there's this sort of sadness that they just didn't quite. I know, I know. And at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, but your work is great and it's brilliant and you made a career out of it. You did, you did break into the New York. Yeah, how did that happen? I guess I had some ambition. I think it takes a lot of drive and luck and then luck with timing. So I started sending, I had, who did who help me with this? Giovanna Peebles introduced me to the guy who does all the photographs and I'm hated that I can't come up with this name right now, but Peter Miller or no, the Weimar Einer ones, the dog photos, you know who I mean. Yes, yes, yes. But anyway, he and his wife were connected in New York and they gave me a short list of galleries that were interested in this realism. Is it UNAC? No, no, no. Those are paintings. These are photographs. They're photographs. And I, this is horrible that I'm stumbling with this. If I'd known your question, I would have researched my answers. But anyway, they gave me a short list of galleries in New York that were interested in realism and believe me, it is a short list. So I just started sending exhibition announcements and photographs of my work to those galleries thinking, well, it doesn't hurt to have them, see my name and say, where have I seen that name? Because it came in their mailbox. I mean, that's not possible anymore to do that. Everything happens electronically and everything's screened and you can't submit. So one of those galleries was Sherry French Gallery on 57th Street. Not a top tier realist gallery, but a good gallery. And that was my start. I stayed with her for seven years. And from there, I moved over to David Findlay Galleries with the help of Lee Potter Findlay. At the time the gallery was being operated by her younger brother, Michael Findlay, who now lives in Middlebury. I mean, it all comes, it all goes around, as you know. Circle. So I stayed with him until the gallery closed a year or two after the Great Recession began. So I had about 14 years in New York. Well, that's extraordinary. And you know what? You're not giving credit to your work. So I just want to give credit to your work. That's what oftentimes gets you to that level is the extraordinary work that you do. Now in 2015, you were invited to be a fellow at the Ball and Glenn Arts Foundation, Balli Castle, Ireland. Share with us your love of Ireland, because a lot of your work is focused on that country. Yeah, that was just, that was an adventure. It was a residency fellowship that I learned about from another artist, apply that application process and recommendations and how those things go. And I was fortunate to be invited to spend five weeks there and it's a small situation. It's very rural, it's very Irish, but in many ways it's not that different from rural Vermont, except that the ocean is just half a miles walk away. That part is pretty phenomenal and the weather is quite different. But anyway, I had great five weeks in residence there and another week or so traveling around. I don't know what my romance with Ireland I'm really astounded on. I certainly have Irish ancestry. I just have a romantic attachment to Ireland. We have a section on your website. By the way, folks, cathleencolb.com, you have a, you click on, you know, and it comes down like six different items, including watercolors. And one of them is Ireland and all of your paintings from Ireland are there. So that's why I focused on that. Well, let's talk a little bit about the art of action because I was involved in that as a board member of the Vermont Arts Council. It was kind of a big deal back when we did it. And you were part of 10 artists that were selected from over 300 applicants. Tell us about that experience. That was great. It was crazy in a lot of ways. It was really crazily structured, but it was an inspiration between the Vermont Arts Council and Lyman Orton and his partner, Janisitzi. And they funded this amazing program to create art by Vermont artists in a certain timeframe about the future of Vermont. Being a realist, I remember telling the panel that I couldn't really paint the future because I paint what I see in the future. It's not invisible to me any more than it is to the rest of us, but that I would look for the cutting edge of the chosen subject area I had, which was the working forest. So I really enjoyed doing that. It was really exciting to go and find the loggers and foresters who were doing responsible logging and follow them around and photograph them and bring those photos back to the studio, make the work, try to do it in this absurd timeframe, and then the whole thing had its own mechanism for being resolved. But it was a great experience. The other artists were wonderful, but the experience of having an excuse to go and spend time with these workers and feel that that was valid, that I wasn't begging a favor of them just for myself. It was for the state. Right, it was fabulous. It was amazing. And I know that one of your paintings hangs at Main Street Landing. Now you've been showing your work since the early 1980s. How has the art world and the business of art changed for you over the years? I think the business of art has changed a lot over the years and a lot of that's the way the digital era has changed everything. I mean, the fact that we're doing this, that I'm gonna be able to screen share images, that just wasn't the case. I mean, it used to be you took slides and sent slides to places. It was a very cumbersome process. And of course it's much bigger. It's so much like everything. It's so much more competitive now because there's so many more people competing for the same amount of exposure and claim. I mean, I watch the younger people who I meet on residency, for instance, at the Vermont Studio Center and they're ambitious, they're hardworking. They really wanna do something different and it's really hard to get attention because there are so many people clamoring for it in so few places that can really provide that exposure. And I think it's changed a lot. Now, in the meantime, I've had a daughter who, I have a daughter who has become an art dealer and an international art dealer. So I see another view of it that does keep me humble, Melinda, because she's dealing with the celebrity artists that you hear about or read about and the international art fairs and all of that stuff. So I'm very mindful that there's a lot more going on up there than what I see right here in Vermont. For her, what is her name? Her name is Anna Fisher Brodsky. Her work name is Anna Fisher. Anna Fisher. Yeah. Well, congratulations to your daughter. That must be so much fun that she's sort of fallen into the art world. So also you did work in dance, film and television. I saw that on your website. I tell us a little bit about that work that you've done. Well, those are projects that come up. So dance was an invitation from a dear friend who I taught with at the Governor's Institute on the Arts for many years. Still a dear friend, Peggy Pelikwin, who's a fabulous modern dancer, worked with some great companies. David Dorfman, that's included. And she's made a number of pieces. She went on to do choreography and teaching and other things that dancers have to do. But she, one of the pieces that she choreographed, she wanted some visuals. And she had a videographer involved and she wanted some images. And so we worked together and I gave her some images and they worked into her show. So that was a dance. Film was a different thing. The gallery I was working with in Vermont at the time in Stowe, Clark Galleries, developed a relationship with a production company that was doing the film, What Lives Beneath. I think who has that? Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, I think. And there was an artist character. The set designers needed stuff. So he contracted with them and basically rented them the entire contents of my studio. I mean, I basically, it all went. Everything went to LA. A truck came and they took the couch. They took the easels, they took the books. They took the pallets, the brushes, the paint. Everything came back with little labels on it like this that said cold. I mean, this is a tin can. They took that to LA. So that was fun. There was some money in that for me and I was very grateful for that. That came, I think right before the recession. So that's just projects, TV and trying to remember what to do. Your work has expanded into so many areas. Now you have a list of works as noted in your bibliography. On KathleenCole.com, and I encourage my viewers to please visit Kathleen's website. Your work is broad, deep and extensive. You have your work in so many selected collections around the country. You are an internationally recognized artist. I would like to share some of your work with our viewers. Oh, we're halfway through our show. Well, actually we only have 11 minutes left. But I really want my viewers to see your work. And I was wondering if you'd be willing to share some of your images and talk about them. I would love to. So I'm gonna try this. We'll see if it works. You tell me if this is effective. Thank you. What have we got? Thank you, Kathleen. You bet. So this is a recent, I'm showing you recent work because I have a show up now at Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. And some of the work is a little different and some is the same. This is a watercolor. And we're not seeing it, so. You're not seeing it. Oh wait, share screen. How about that? How about that? Let's see how this works. How's that? There you go. You started sharing your screen. There it is. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm glad you alerted me to the fact that it wasn't working. I hope it looks good. It looks beautiful. This is a painting from a photo taken in Scotland of a dear friend and I went. Let's see if we can move to the next one. This is a recent watercolor of a fun. This is more my traditional subject matter. So there's a couple pieces in the show that follow traditional subject matter, which seems like how do you do? How do you do the detail you do in watercolor? Because watercolor is not easy to, it's not an easy medium. And then to be able to do the kind of detail you do. Well, let's keep moving through your, but I just want my viewers to understand that Kathleen painted this with, you know, with a water in watercolor. Right. Well, let's see if I can figure this out. I've got having a little trouble with my application here. Yeah, painted that in watercolor. And it's just what I do. I'm kind of a nutcase for having it. So let's, I'm sorry. Just let me go, see if I can figure out how to get this screen back on my screen. So I know what I'm looking at. Well, if you just hit, yeah, I can tell you too what you're looking at, but. It's minimized at the moment. I can't figure out how to get it back up to where I can see it all. Well, let's, let's, let's some, let us go back to our interview. And I'm going to send people to the Edgewater site. Okay. Cause we've got, we only have eight minutes left. Here we go. I'm going to whiz through some images then. Just to give you a taste. So these are more, these are more recent. This, there's a few pieces here that have to do a little bit with the pandemic. You can't see the far shore. You're in a beautiful place, but there's, it's isolating. I also love to paint pictures of the night. This painting is of an elderly housing building in the tiny town I live in Lincoln. So it, the paintings titled elders. And, you know, it's meaningful to me as I think about our community. Again, this has to do a little bit with the pandemic because of the isolation we're all experiencing. This is a dear friend with her dog. We were out for a walk. Another place that I dearly love. This was a farm that belonged to another very close friend up in the Northeast kingdom. Like these are all meaningful for me. As I look at them, it's actually good for me to realize this, this is another very dear friend in the doorway of his barn in Lincoln on a very cold early March evening. Lots of snow, same barn from a different view. And again, back to that, how are we gonna get out of this pandemic? What do we see in the future here? What's gonna happen? And yet we live in a beautiful world and we are the lucky ones to be able to be here in Vermont through this experience. Are these good, Melinda, is this working for you? These are amazing. And talk about, you talk about your ability to capture light. You're a realist painter and you have this ability to capture light, which is extraordinary. And you actually highlight that when you talk about your work. Well, it means a lot to me. But my end did. So here's light that's crept away from the world. This lone person doing her evening walk up a hillside, but the daylight is gone. In this one, the daylight is only barely lingering in the sky and on the top of Mount Abraham, but the light originates in the barn. So I've taken up an interest in very different qualities of light. Now, this is an older painting that came out of an estate recently. And this is also part of the show. And I'm kind of excited that there are four, five or six paintings at the gallery that are not recent because they come from a period when I was also doing some amazing work. This was sold in New York and never shown in Vermont before. So it's a unique opportunity to see it. It's a three by four foot painting. And here you see the very direct sunlight on the snow and on the corner of the building. The title of the piece is Column of Light for obvious reasons. You see that the light has created this version of a column in the architecture. So then this again is one of the older pieces of view from the top of Snake Mountain. So reflected light on all those little chunks of water out in the view and on the rocks. Here again, the reflected light in the, or the remaining light in the sky. I mean, you know that's being lit from beyond the horizon as the earth turns away from the sun, but there's a little glimmer of it on that river in the foreground as well. And then at the other end of the day, the dawn light coming up and lifting the mist off the lake. So there's many versions of light that I'm attracted to and drawn to and they're all here. This particular painting is a favorite of mine. It's of my son Nathan, who has autism and is a wonderful human being and who loves the water. So this is him going into the lake, a lake in Greensboro one misty morning. So maybe I'll stop there because I like that picture. That's beautiful. Well, you know, I have a grandson with autism, Rowan Wild Riggs, right? I know, I love seeing your posts about him. We should get together sometime and talk about our beloved, you know. These men. All right, so we're gonna unshare your screen. They are perfect. Well, we're coming down to the end of the show. We have four minutes left. I could talk to you for days. And that's mutual. Well, that's why we need to get together. And you're down in Middlebury. So let's talk about the show you have right now called Fragile and Familiar. Those are some of the images that you showed there at the Edgewater Gallery on the Green in Montpelier. It runs through November 8th. Tell us about this exhibit and in my viewers, I encourage you to go on down to Middlebury and see this exhibit at the Edgewater Gallery on the Green in Montpelier. Thank you, Melinda. I really appreciate that. Because when you're an artist, you do a lot of work in isolation because you have something that is compelling to you. It's so compelling that you have to make it. And the making of it might take weeks or months. So you really has to be meaningful to you to do it or you wouldn't stick with it. So when you go to see a show, bear in mind that it represents years out of an artist's life, generally speaking. Certainly the case for me in this show because I started the work probably in 2020 and worked on it, got a new knee in the interim which took a little time but went back to work on it this spring and finished the work, delivered it in September. And now it's on the wall for a brief month. So I want as many people as possible to enjoy it, to go and enjoy it. Well, we're gonna have to do that. Now listen, Kathleen, what's next for you? What are you working on now? And what's next for you? What's next is moving the compost, Melinda. All the things I didn't do while preparing for the show. Cleaning out the garden, moving the compost, bringing the firewood onto the porch. But I do have several commissions lined up and there's a number of pieces that I really wanted to do for this show and didn't have time for. And they're stuck in here and desperate to get out. So there's some more things coming in line with what I was making, some more obscure shore pictures and a lot more nighttime pictures. I've got so much in my mind to do that. Definitely. We are the recipients of what's in your mind. So tell us very quickly, we have a couple minutes left. What are your words of wisdom for young artists today who wanna create a career as an artist? To remember that as an artist, your basic mission is to tell the truth. You may lust after fame and fortune, but if you don't tell the truth, you're not gonna get there. The rest of it is luck and timing and ambition. But you need to just stay true to yourself and make the things that matter most. That's beautiful, but it also is a gift. And as great musicians, great artists, great writers, there's a gift that comes with that and Kathleen Colb, you've got that gift and you shared it with us and you've shared it with the world. And I'm so glad that you're here in Vermont and that we can see you and see your work locally. And I wanna thank you. I'm gonna go to the view so everybody can see both of us together here. I wanna thank you for your time and for sharing this with my viewers. And to my viewers, please visit Kathleen's website, KathleenColb.com and check it out. So to you, my friends, let's get together down the road and I wish you all the best in a beautiful winter, capturing the light and the beauty that you capture. And thank you for your time, Kathleen. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Melinda. It's been an honor. And to my viewers, thank you for tuning in and I will see you again really soon. Bye-bye.