Katherine Sobba Green

"In your light, I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees you.

But sometimes I do.

And that sight becomes this art."--Rumi

 

After she retired from Western Kentucky University five years ago, Katie Green and her husband Bill moved to Fredericksburg to be near their grandchildren. It was then that she took a few painting classes and discovered her passion.

 

“I am so fascinated by this journey I am on,” she says, “by the process of finding compositions, laying in color, encountering accidents, and, always, always, seeing anew. It is when I’ve settled matters like size, support, and palette with my head that I move into what is for me, new territory—where the body and the heart must take the lead. Then, I turn on the jazz, and hope for a portal into the flow, into the dance that Rumi describes.”

 

“My paintings often begin with a moment of pleasure I find in nature: a flash of color; a slant of light; a pattern of shadows; a vignette of bird, or bug, or flower. Rather than capturing the grand sweep of a landscape or the crisp angles of manmade structures, I usually highlight the small shapes, textures, and gestures of field and forest.”

 

Now a full-time artist, Green laughingly says that her decades of experience teaching English literature have been very helpful in providing titles for her paintings. “And now I know why I’ve always carried colors in my head the way other people do names.”