by Rae Chavez
July 25 – August 5, 2025 | Artist Reception: Friday, July 25th, 5–7pm
With the bold confidence of a brush shaped by decades of practice and a spirit shaped by desert winds, sun-drenched plateaus, and shifting skies, Kathryn Stedham returns to Blue Rain Gallery with Out West, a powerful new exhibition of landscape paintings that redefine our relationship with the American Southwest.
Stedham’s work is never simply about place. It’s about presence.
For over 20 years, she has lived and painted in the rugged beauty of the Southwest. Her landscapes not only portray the West, they inhabit it. Each composition is a study in contrasts: light and shadow, precision and abstraction, stillness and motion. From aerial vistas like Cloud Shadows, where the viewer seemingly floats above the terrain, to grounded moments like Black Mesa Day, Stedham’s paintings radiate both physical grandeur and spiritual depth.
“Sometimes I have an idea about a place, but as I paint it, the painting says, ‘No, that’s not what I’m about. I’m about this.’ Some of them are bossier than others, but I follow along.”
That intuition is part of Stedham’s signature. Though classically trained in realism, she describes her process as deeply modernist and interpretive. Her work lives in the liminal space between seeing and feeling - what she calls “a kind of meditation,” where the goal isn’t photographic accuracy, but rather the mystery of how a landscape moves you.
“I used to feel like I had to put everything in a painting,” she reflects. “Now I try to emphasize what’s most important. A cloud. A line of horizon. You don’t have to tell the whole story, you just need to tell the truth.”
Out West marks a deepening of this philosophy. The brushwork is still painterly and gestural, but the compositions feel more distilled, more essential. There’s a reverence for silence in these pieces, for the wide, unspoken wisdom of land shaped by time. Wild horses sprint through dreamlike haze in “Horse Country Wagon Mound”, while the desert dusk settles over mesas like a whispered spell. Each scene pulses with memory, intimacy, and the kind of beauty that refuses to be captured, yet somehow is.
Stedham’s studio practice is as grounded as her vision. She rises early, long before the world stirs, and enters her space with quiet intention. Coffee in hand, she listens to audiobooks or meditative voices before the brush ever touches canvas. It's a practice shaped by solitude and discipline, but also joy.
“When I’m working on a body of work like this, it’s like being on a retreat. I need that stillness. That feeling-before-thought. That’s when the good painting happens.”
This inner landscape, the devotion to feeling, is what makes Out West such a transportive experience. As an avid plein air painter, Stedham brings her years of hiking, climbing, and horseback riding into every piece. You can sense it: the crunch of gravel underfoot, the shimmer of heat off stone, the hush of an empty sky stretching overhead.
“Painting can express more than the object itself,” she says. “It can capture that mysterious grip you feel when you’re looking at something vast and beautiful, and you can’t quite put it into words.”
For those new to her work, this exhibition offers a powerful invitation, not just to see the West, but to feel it. To step inside the paintings and experience what Stedham calls “that moment that gives you chills,” when emotion rises before words do.
As Leah Garcia of Blue Rain Gallery puts it,
“Kathryn Stedham’s paintings offer a fresh yet soulful interpretation of the American West. With bold brushwork and a meditative palette, she captures not just the landscape, but its silence, strength, and spirit. Her work bridges tradition and contemporary vision, making each piece a compelling addition for collectors seeking both timeless beauty and expressive depth.”
In Out West, Kathryn Stedham invites us to slow down, look deeper, and listen closely to the land, to ourselves, and to the in-between space where memory and landscape meet.
