Kelly Kotary
Kelly Kotary is in the midst of a painting career that almost wasn’t. Since her childhood in Ohio, she knew that she was an artist. She dreamed of finding success like her heroes John Singer Sargent and Richard Schmid. When she received her BFA from Wittenberg University in 1998 and relocated to beautiful Colorado, she thought she was on her way. A year later, however, she put her painting aside and turned her focus to finding ‘more practical’ work.
In 2008, she impulsively took a part-time job at a gallery. She was invited to sit in at a workshop with James Biggers and Cathy Goodale, who had studied with Schmid. From there she was lucky enough to meet several other prominent local painters who were combining abstraction with landscape paintings in ways that just electrified her. It was a new way of thinking about painting – representational work based on abstract structures! — and she knew it was the essential connection that her earlier work had been missing. The final piece of the puzzle was the discovery of plein air painting. She feels blessed and grateful every day for the chance to share her work with the world.
Kelly is a Loveland, Colorado based painter whose award-winning oil paintings can be found in public and private collections all over the country.
read Kelly Kotary’s Artist Statement