Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Catherine Kirkland has spent the majority of her life as a Kansas resident, moving to Lenexa, Kansas in 2008. Since 2013, she has been actively exhibiting her paintings in Lenexa and the surrounding regional arts community. In 2017, she made creating and showing art her full-time business.

 

Ms. Kirkland’s current body of work is comprised of four collections: her space series, hard-edge abstracts and her Zorn palette paintings and landscapes. Inspiration for her space series pointillist works include internationally known pointillist painter, Vance Kirkland (no known relation), Seurat, Van Gogh and Signac, as well as contemporary painter David S. Parker. The hard-edged abstracts, some with pointillist details, are achieved through the use alternative tools and techniques and are inspired by works of mid-century artists such as Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin. The color palette Catherine employed in her Zorn collection is attributed to Anders Zorn, a 19th century Swedish painter; the subject matter is inspired by Art Deco designs and mid-century abstracts.

Since embarking on her visual arts career, Catherine has exhibited her works in a juried regional exhibition at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph and also at an invitational solo exhibition in the Regional Gallery of the George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, Missouri. Additionally, she has mounted solo exhibits in the metro through ArtsKC Now Showing, as well as at the Lenexa City Hall Gallery, Lee’s Summit City Hall Gallery, Tim Murphy Gallery in Merriam, Open Spaces, the metro-wide art festival and the Johnson County Arts and Heritage Center. Her artwork has been accepted into numerous juried group exhibitions in the Kansas City metro and has been recognized with several awards.

In 2019, a large collection of her space series was purchased and installed in The Lofts at City Center in Lenexa. It is in this multi-use property, that she opened a studio-gallery in January 2021, and worked in until late 2022, as the “resident” artist.

Prior working full-time in visual arts, Ms. Kirkland enjoyed a 35+ year career in advertising and publishing, as an award-winning art director, illustrator, graphic designer and production manager.  

During her career at Andrews McMeel Publishing and Universal Press Syndicate as Creative Director and Technical Production Director, she had the privilege of working with internationally known creators and authors such as Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes), Gary Larson (The Far Side), Jim Davis (Garfield), Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy) and many more.

While at Andrews McMeel, she was invited by the Library of Congress, to participate in the Preserving Creative America, a project  component of the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program (NDIIPP) strategic Initiative. This initiative was established to define standards and methods for preserving digital creative works for 50 years or more. She worked alongside and presented to executives, creatives and technical professionals from The Recording Academy (Grammy), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (Oscars), Walt Disney Company, Getty Images, Warner Bros Studio, Universal Studios, 20th  Century Fox, Sony Pictures and many more.

Her formal art education was as a Studio Art major at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where she gained experience and knowledge of illustration, painting in oil and acrylic, ceramic and metal sculpture. She continued adding skills in photography, film and video production, airbrush illustration through on-the-job experiences and post-college classes and workshops.

Her latest “art-venture” is an expansion of her business to an online store, selling custom-printed products that feature her artwork. In collaboration with Felipe Roberson-Torrech, a Capoeira instructor at the Brazil Academy in Olathe, she designed the Freedom Collection, comprised of three sizes of mugs offered at the online shop. At the inception of the project, she and Felipe made the decision to donate 50% of the profits to the local Stop Trafficking Project, an organization working to end domestic minor sex trafficking.

For more information about exhibits, events and samples of her work, visit her web site:
https://www.kirklandcreativeart.com