Kathleen Loesch

My paintings define a great deal of what I feel and respond to in my life.  Things I touch.  People I love.  Visions that move me. Sometimes, they are reflections of a brief moment.  A cherished experience.   Mostly painted, in the simple and honest terms of the realist painter who finds great beauty in even the most ordinary things.  But my greatest pleasure as a painter comes from giving life to a subject and capturing all the character, personality, and charm that drew me to it in the first place.

There was a time during my early teens when I had big aspirations of becoming a cartoonist like Mort Drucker in Mad magazine.  I filled dozens of drawing pads characterizing friends and family with humorous adventures and tales.  By the time I reached fifteen I was fairly accurate in capturing not only the likeness of the people I was lampooning, but their personalities as well.... an essential part of the punch line.

Fifteen, was a artistic turning point for me with two very major elements contributing to it.  One occured with my mother giving me my first box of oil paints and a few lessons in painting techniques.  The other occured when my High School art teacher asked me to put the cartoons aside and concentrate my efforts doing "serious" renditions of my fellow students in art class.

Thus began a deep love for painting the figure and a budding interest in portraiture.

My little niece, Olive, has an amazing interest in bugs...finding them under rocks and rotting wood, picking them up and closely examining them before setting them free again.  In painting her portrait, it seemed most natural to capture her in the wild grass where the bugs all crawl.

My deepest passion in painting comes from painting full figure portraits in enviornments and spaces that reflect the personality within.  In this regard, the finished work moves beyond family love and perceptions of the sitter, but can be appreciated by anyone viewing it.