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 six 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. This year, she is spending a month in Badlands Natonal
Park in Montana.
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.