I paint landscape-inspired work in an age of extremes. My work is about the delicate interconnectedness of living things, the struggle for dominance in ecosystems, and the state of volatility in our environment.

We are in a state of flux. In this erratic, unpredictable, often chaotic world, my process is an exploration of the elemental forces in nature. The water, atmosphere, light, and land are drifting, pulling apart, converging, ascending, and descending. I appropriate situations in landscapes and allow deviations and disruptions to occur with the paint. My process becomes a metaphor for the shifting earth and environment.

I am drawn to how light shifts our perception of what surrounds us, creating halos of soft diffusion or pockets of ambiguity. I am intrigued by patterns and distortions in landscapes- where images of what is 'real' and what is 'reflected' are set adrift or submerged in a nebulous space. I marvel at the mystery that exists in the shadows and the emergence of light from darkness.

The light is truth.


"Kathryn St Clair also paints deceptively placid figurative landscape designs, mostly waterscapes amid verdant forests. Any notion of safe subject matter is upthrown with her non-traditional color palette of oranges, purples and fuschias, her texture and abstraction of the skies, and the swampy, dripping spots of atypical colors and soft, but not quite accurate reflections in the landscape, capturing that moment before abstraction. When combined with her use of silhouettes, similar to the early arts and crafts modernism of the 1920s, it truly brings her artwork to a level of great significance." - Monique Delaunay, San Francisco Art Beat, January, 2011