Kathi Packer

“I never intended for my safari trip in Africa to radically redirect my creative sensibilities. At the outset, it was simply a long anticipated voyage of discovery. It was only later in my studio, that I realized how profoundly this experience had affected me.”

My new work explores zebras in the wild but goes beyond mere visual description. The perceived drama reveals a universal message of survival and vulnerability, a decade long interest of mine. Each image is a fragment of movement and time. These ephemeral postures could at once depict a falling, resting, dying or a joyously playful animal. The viewer doesn’t really know the beginning, middle or end of this choreography, nor the context. Similarly, the character of the landscape depicted creates a fluid atmosphere where dust and mist provide a delicate but ambiguous veil to the drama or joy of the moment.

These small intimate paintings read much larger than the dimensions suggest. Passages of color and texture highlight the translucency and opacity within each painting. Similarly, the larger drawings invite the viewer into a self-contained world of movement and reveal a sense of drama through a bold, expressive quality of line. While never intended as studies for other work, the drawings nonetheless inform the paintings and vice versa.

Kathi Packer’s work is represented in several institutional collections including The New Britain Museum of American Art, Galeria Nacional de Costa Rica, The University of Connecticut School of Medicine, The Phoenix Corporation and Hartford Hospital. She is also represented in private collections throughout the United States.

Also visit: http://www.kathipacker.com