Kathy Hodge
was born in a neighborhood of Providence, RI called Washington
Park. At the age of 14 she took up her parents' oil paints, put
aside after they graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design
and started their family of seven children. She also attended
RISD and majored in painting. After 2 years she found it necessary
to leave school to work in an art supply store for a year to finance
her further education. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts
degree in painting from Swain School of Design in New Bedford,
MA in 1980.
After graduating
she returned to Providence, where she was inspired by the drama
and light effects of the industrial waterfront and the power of
the huge ships which docked there. She was also attracted to the
massive earth moving project of the river relocation in downtown
Providence. The work she produced on these themes was exhibited
in three one-person shows in 1991 and 1992 and featured in the
Sunday Magazine of the Providence Journal.
Her style
underwent a transformation after a short trip to Europe in 1990.
It was her first series of work inspired by travel. She produced
a body of work using a more somber tone and new imagery: the dark
Irish Sea, an ancient church in Killarney and the cagelike ascent
of the Eiffel Tower.
After her
trip she moved to Bristol, RI and her work was further influenced
by the stark organic forms of the salt marshes and the natural
landscape which surrounded her home on the bay. She was also climbing
and painting the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
Hodge
has been appointed artist-in-residence eight times
by the National Parks Service. In 1993 she worked
from a historic cabin in Rocky Mountain National
Park. In 1997 she was invited to live and work
for two weeks in the Cape Cod National Seashore,
continuing the tradition of artists who found
inspiration and escape in the primitive shacks
in the Provinceland dunes.
In 1998 she worked in Acadia National Park in
Maine, and in 1999 she was taken by boat to the
solitude of a cabin on Sand Island in the Apostle
Island National Lakeshore, 3 miles offshore on
Lake Superior. Her most recent residency, in 2000,
was at Glacier National Park in Montana. In 2002,
she spent a month in Badlands Natonal Park in
Montana, in 2008 she explored the cliff dwellings
of the Ancestral Puebloan people in Mesa Verde
National Park. In the fall of 2009 she will return
to the dunes, not by the Atlantic, but at the
foot of the Sangre de Christo Mountains in Colorado
at Great Sand Dunes National Park.
In addition
to painting the natural world, she has also produced a series
of paintings of 14 churches.
The series explored the unique architecture of churches, using
examples from Providence to Newport. In the antique stores which
surrounded her home she discovered dusty and broken ornate frames
from the early 1900s, which relinquished ancestral portraits and
religious prints, and now surround and enrich the church paintings.
Her
current studio is in East Providence, RI where
she produced a series of paintings of her impressions
of 10 days she spent in St. Petersburg and Moscow,
which she exhibited in a one person show, "10
Days in Russia", in February of 2002. This
group was exhibited in a one person show at the
Bert Gallery in Providence in February of 2002.
A series of paintings taking inspiration from
the view out the train window from Providence
to New York City was exhibited in March of 2005
at the Bert Gallery.
In
2008, she exhibited paintings which took inspiration
from shoe making equipment. The 1 person show,
St. Hugh's Bones, was exhibited at the Gail Cahalan
Gallery in Providence, RI.
