Artist Kathy Holland to Teach Young Artists at Children’s Museum

by Kay Brookshire, Media Consultant, 865.483.4644 kbrookshire@bellsouth.net

Children in after-school art classes will learn about how artists work and create an acrylic painting on canvas to exhibit at the Children's Museum of Oak Ridge as they study and paint with artist Kathy Holland this month.

Holland is the second artist to work with a group of 15 fourth graders from Willow Brook School's Wednesday Academy in the Willow Brook Young Artists Program at the Children's Museum, funded by a community learning grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission. A mixed media exhibit by artist Dawn Kunkel ended last week, with children in her classes exhibiting their mixed media creations in the museum's Gallery II.

Holland's exhibit opens this week in Gallery II and remains there through March 9. Her students will add their work to the exhibit for the closing reception for the artist and students that will take place from 3:30 – 4:15, March 7.

Holland said she hopes to lead the children in a playful and engaging process for making pictures. She will start by learning about her students' perceptions of art and what artists do all day, and then take her students into Gallery II, showing them slides of artists and other influences on her work. The artist will talk about what's so special about art at this time in history, and how it's affected, for example, by science, technology, and space.

The children will gather sources of visual information from direct observation, studies or sketches, photographs, and other means, and look at how they can change those into something new, what Holland calls the "translating process." Assisting Holland will be Coral Juras, an artist and a teacher at Willow Brook School.

"Eventually, we'll move to the canvas itself. We will talk about how to mix colors, show them how to stretch canvas. We'll talk about other things they can paint on, and how acrylic paint behaves," she said. "We will talk about things like form and composition and line and use of color as they are painting."

Children will help prepare for the reception, wiring the back of the canvas for hanging, making signs for their artwork, taking photographs to document what they did, and sending invitation to family and friends.

Holland is an exhibiting artist and board member of the Art Market Gallery, a cooperative gallery in Knoxville. She teaches drawing and life drawing classes at the Oak Ridge Art Center and oil painting at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Exhibiting throughout the region, her solo exhibits have been in the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery in 2004 and Townsend Art Gallery in 1997.

She exhibited extensively throughout Ontario, Canada, from 1986-1997, when she moved to Oak Ridge. She studied wood-engraving with Blair Hughes-Stanton at the Central School of Art and Design in London, England. Holland received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking from the School of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Since graduation, she has created drawings, etchings, and paintings, and maintained a full schedule of juried national and international exhibitions and solo shows. She has also worked as a freelance graphic artist, medical illustrator, drawing instructor and outdoor muralist.