Nov 15, 2004

Kate McGloughlin's "Running Water" Opens Nov. 20th

Distinguished Olivebridge artist Kate McGloughlin captures the dynamic water/landscape of Platte Clove in the Catskills with "Running Water", a new series of paintings, prints and works-on-paper at Kiesendahl+Calhoun Contemporary Art,
192 Main Street, Beacon, NY. Opening November 20th through January 30th.

The heart and soul of Kate McGloughlin's work belongs to the landscape of her birth. Her new series of Platte Clove in the Catskills, Running Water, reveals an evolutionary leap in her work, a primal connection between the artist and the Hudson Valley landscape she paints. 

Nazareth College Art Professor Ron Netsky notes that in McGloughlin's "Fallen Rock, Falling Water, branches slash through the composition of rocks like the grand gestural strokes of an abstract-expressionist canvas. In those strokes we find more than an artist's reaction to what she is witnessing. McGloughlin offers a heightened vision of that experience so that the viewer can feel it too."

The powerful energy of the Running Water series comes from McGloughlin's stay last summer in a cabin on Platte Clove as Artist-in-Residence granted by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. Overlooking two waterfalls, the artist worked day after day sitting and working, absorbed in one spot within the clove. 
"I got so involved with the rhythm of that place" McGloughlin says "that I started to feel as though I could map the jut of stone and vein of water with my eyes closed". In this reverential work the artist shares with us her awe and affection for the miraculous forces within these dark woods. 

In her pastel, Moss on Ledges, the observer can feel the softness of the moss juxtaposed with the forcefulness of water running over stone, along with a dance of color and dappled light seeping through the trees. In the 22"x 30" Water Finds its Way, one of the artist's bold black and white mixed-media work from the series, McGloughlin ventures into new territory by using a larger-than-familiar scale and shows additional maturity by freeing herself from reliance on color. These minimal, confident strokes harness the vertical force of water that one might imagine ending in a horizontal, calm, dark pool below. 

A native of Olivebridge, New York, award-winning artist Kate McGloughlin received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1985 and later studied printmaking with Robert Angeloch at the Woodstock School of Art, where she currently teaches printmaking and serves on the Board of Directors. McGloughlin, a master of painting and printmaking, recently returned from Italy where she has taught workshops for various years. Since 1999 the artist has been included in Who's Who in American Art. McGloughlin has numerous publications and awards of distinction and has participated in solo and selected group shows.