Featured Artist: Catherine Freshley!

After several years of working full time in advertising and trying to build a painting business, I left my full-time job two years ago to spend more time on my art. I have always been making art and since 2011, have been focusing on painting landscapes. I paint with Golden and Liquitex acrylics and most often paint on canvas. I am constantly taking photos of the beautiful landscape around me. I take photos at stop lights, out on the open road, from inside the airport terminal; though I sometimes go on a drive specifically to take photos, most often I am inspired by scenes in my everyday life.

Catherine Freshley is a landscape painter originally from Portland, Oregon, currently living in Wichita, Kansas. Freshley is endlessly inspired by and in constant awe of our natural surroundings. She responds most to scenes of “normal,” yet spectacular, beauty – not mountains, or canyons, or any kind of remarkable geographic formations, but the openness of flat land, the highways that stretch across it and the expansive skies above it all. Freshley aims to capture and preserve the beauty of these everyday scenes and whether of vast, clear skies or dramatic cloud formations, her paintings transport the viewer to places that are familiar and comfortable. Her paintings are representative, but she omits intricate detail, allowing viewers to layer their own memory and meaning onto her paintings.

Freshley has a degree in economics and English from Tulane University in New Orleans. She worked for a New Orleans-based advertising agency for seven years and now spends most of her time as an artist and occasionally consults in brand and digital advertising strategy. Freshley has taken art classes at Tulane, University of Oregon, Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and has studied with Marc Hanson.