Kathleen Galligan

"My lifetime of painting has been an exploration of light and its complex relationship with the natural world. As I transition between pastels and oils, between real and imagined landscapes and abstracts, my “voice,” which is an expression of light, remains a constant. How I express this changes because each painting becomes a journey that propels me forward through the process of experimentation and investigation.

The subjects of my paintings lie mostly within traditional landscape territory, but whose borders sometimes blur and other times burst into abstraction. Lately, I've used textures and abstracted shapes of imagined polar waters and glacial ice to investigate light penetrating different states of matter, liquid to frozen. The range of blue tones and values imply differing depths and multiple levels and create a network of shapes to follow. Creating a successful painting out of such imagined spaces presents me with a whole new set of challenges that I purposefully set for myself to continue the motion of exploration into uncharted waters." - Kathleen Galligan

Galligan graduated in 1972 from Wilson College, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania with a B.A. Fine Arts, and in 1979 from Philadelphia College of Art with a B.F.A. Honors. She spent a month at YADDO, an artist residency in Saratoga Springs, New York and a two week residency in Acadia National Park in Maine. Her work is in the collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Bates College Museum of Art, and in many corporate and private collections worldwide.

Articles about Galligan’s work have been included in The Pastel Journal, Pratique des Arts, a French art journal, and in 2018, before moving exclusively from pastels to her current medium—oils—her work in pastels garnered the high praise of inclusion in a book “40 Maitres du Pastel,” published in Paris, a ten-page spread which serves as a culmination of her over thirty year career in pastels.

(Click image to enlarge; cursor over enlarged image for details)