Artist: Kathy McCullen

Medium: Mixed media

Size: 20" x 20" x 1"

About the Artist:

Growing up in Mississippi in a family of storytellers and writers, Kathy McCullen discovered the world of her imagination early in life and has been passionate about art for as long as she can remember. Primarily a self-taught painter, Kathy studied art, literature, and special education at Mississippi State University and had a long career as a teacher. Initially, Kathy focused on art as a therapeutic tool for her students with emotional and learning challenges and taught children's classes in drawing and painting. Ten years ago, however, Kathy began concentrating solely on her own painting and her bold, colorful work is exhibited in Atlanta and Charleston galleries and can be seen in private and corporate collections across the United States and Europe.

While her early work focused on figurative subjects, Kathy's current paintings tell stories of an imaginary world using abstracted images and has been described as poetic. At heart a colorist, Kathy enjoys experimenting with media and techniques and has developed a highly original, appealing style of her own. The use of collage, acrylics, oil pastels, ink, and charcoal allows her to achieve opaque and translucent layers and to create structures from the happy accidents that occur. In her process, compositions build themselves, as Kathy allows intuition to guide the evolution of each painting. Kathy says, "Inspiration and essence are as important to me as the end product. I become completely absorbed with my subject, as colors and shapes reveal themselves, in the process creating, deconstructing, and painting over, until what I have been looking for is finally found."