Artist: Kathy McCullen

Medium: Oil

Size: 30" x 40"

Kathy McCullen is a Georgia-based painter whose work moves between abstraction and representation. Drawn to moments of transition-first light, shifting weather, quiet interiors, the meeting of sea and sky-she uses color, texture, and layers of translucent and opaque pigment to explore the transformative qualities of light and atmosphere.

McCullen grew up in Mississippi in a family that valued imagination, literature, craft, and the natural world. Some of her earliest memories of making and looking are rooted in her grandmother's garden, where she learned the names, habits, and stories of flowers. Although she entered college intending to study art, an early experience working with children with disabilities led her instead to education. During a long teaching career, art remained central to her work with children and students.

She returned seriously to her own painting after her sons left for college. Primarily self-taught, with additional study through workshops with painters she admired, McCullen developed an intuitive, process-driven practice of layering, obscuring, deconstructing, and rediscovering the image.

A lifelong reader and teacher of literature, McCullen frequently finds a point of connection between poetry and painting, sometimes borrowing a line of verse for a title. Whether painting landscape, figure, or flowers, she is less interested in literal description than where observation gives way to memory, atmosphere, and feeling.

McCullen's work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast and is represented by Robert Kent Galleries in Marietta, Georgia, and Mary Martin Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina.