Join us Friday, September 2nd, during the Uptown Butte Artwalk for the opening of 'I Can't Go On, I'll Go On', featuring a selection of new works by Bozeman-area painter, Kathryn W. Schmidt.

about the artist:

KATHRYN W. SCHMIDT was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and educated at the University of Iowa. After periods working in London and San Francisco, she finished the formal part of her education by settling in New York City for six years to work for the city's best contemporary art framer. Now a 32-year resident of Bozeman, she is working full-time in her studio, having built a house and studio, raised a daughter with her artist husband, and worked as a carpenter, taught as an adjunct at MSU and as a preparator at the Museum of the Rockies. She has shown around the west, especially, with work in the Yellowstone Art Center and Holter Museum collections, in group shows at the Tacoma Art Museum, was included in the Missoula Art Museum's Montana Triennial 2012, and was a 2012 recipient of the Montana Art Council's Innovation Award. She has been awarded art residencies at Djerassi in California, Ucross in Wyoming, in Hungary and in 2014 at Grand Canyon National Park.
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The artist offers the following statement for her work:

"We have failed to live up to our geography." Theodore Roethke

Always a proponent of art that carries content, my daily work is to find ways to address the things on my mind in a timeless way. The issues that bombard us, after all, are the perennial ones, like dealing with power and resources. Shakespeare still speaks to us because we haven't changed, or change only slowly. Maybe E.O. Wilson says it best: "We have a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. "

For the last several years I have described my paintings as being about climate change, the somber colors and images registering my despair as the evidence mounts. Paintings like "An Old Altar" are about making some kind of final plea for nature. Then came "West of Everything" and "They Were Kings and Queens," in which figures move beyond the familiar.

More recently I have returned to the animal and bird images of my earlier work. There are the desperate deer images of "Alone and Heading North" and "First Mesa Vision", and then came "A Sharp Intake of Breath". Here I portray the deer as standing in judgment; they materialize in one's vision, bearers of the knowledge that we are burning the ground beneath our feet.

The latest work centers on a haunting phrase from poet W.H. Auden. He writes: "...three pale figures were led forth..." It is tied in my mind to something said by Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson when asked about climate change. He claims that we will adapt, that we always have. With record profits over the years, he may well be able to adapt more than the rest of us, at least temporarily, but I see the animals that surround us as those spectral figures being led forth against a background of fires and heat.