Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.

I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve, I tend to regard it as almost perfect in itself—immune to commentary. The landscapes of nature look back at us in silence and admit no reply. Once carried onto a canvas, the situation is not very different. Analysis tends to gravitate less toward the landscape itself than toward the artist who carries it with them and the manner of its execution.

There are landscape painters and there are landscape painters. I know dozens who developed their work back in my native land, and others who have done so here in the Midwest. One way of considering them all is to attend to the generative impulse that conditions them. Some conceive unreal landscapes—ones that might plausibly exist—or those that, with a few adjustments, can easily be categorized as earthly paradises. And if that were not enough, they often add layered strata of dream, reverie, and mystery in order to sublimate them—and, incidentally, to sublimate their own poetics as well.

Others, as in Hurley’s case, celebrate creation—understood simply as nature—with an overwhelming sincerity and with the opportunity to bear witness to it. Katherine transfers into her landscapes the emotion, the reverence, the joy with which she produces them. It is curiously absurd how all that immateriality adheres so definitively to the canvas and becomes perfectly perceptible.

Many of her canvases portray the slow curves that conceal the Ohio River from her point of observation—meanders she faces each morning or evening from her own backyard. For that reason, I tend to think of her work as a response filled with gratitude for the quiet benevolence of existence itself.

Among her works, I am particularly drawn to those executed in pastel. Probably because landscape painting is, to a large degree, a matter of light, and light—as we all know—changes at every moment: it moves, it confounds, and it reveals at each instant a renewed landscape, something Impressionism has already exhausted in endless theoretical justifications. But also because, to capture the perfect harmony of what the instant grants us, pastel seems to be one of the ideal mediums. It can be swift, resolved with vehemence. It depends neither on liquid mediums nor on long drying processes; color is deposited immediately and remains visible in its original intensity.

When it comes to fixing the referent—not only the one before us, but also the one that inhabits the spirit—it allows the artist to resolve it through successive layers of pure pigment applied directly onto the support, usually a paper with a slightly rough surface capable of retaining the particles of color.

Once the general relations of light and atmosphere have been established, a captivating superimposition of layers begins, applied and softly diffused in order to produce subtle transitions between planes. These delicate gradations are particularly effective for representing surfaces such as water, sky, or masses of vegetation.

Kay masters pastel—everything already mentioned and, in addition, an impressive chromatic palette. Constant practice, or perhaps a natural predisposition to understand and command infinite and perfect combinations of tones, certainly matters, though it is not definitive. She achieves intense chromatic contrasts and, at the same time, extraordinarily delicate nuances through which she induces naturalistic, expressive, and symbolic approaches to the landscape she brings to the canvas. They also favor results of remarkable atmospheric sensitivity, where the texture of the support, the relative transparency of the layers, and the pulsations of the pigment contribute to an image that preserves a direct, almost tactile quality of her artistic gesture.

Much of the art produced today has foolishly drifted away from “the beautiful,” from the celebration of the natural, from anything that does not constitute a socio-political declaration. Only the representation of the female figure seems to persist with similar intent, still addressed on a massive scale. Beyond that, thousands of artists persist in landscape painting which, at this point, functions almost as an act of resilience—or as a countercultural activity.

Consider something less obvious than it appears: what intention might an artist have in painting a landscape? Is it not, among other lesser motives, to share the beauty unfolding before them—or at the very least their interpretation of it? Seen this way, is it not a genuinely altruistic act? For my part, it is.

I know—because I am close enough to see it—that Kay Hurley is, above all, an artist who shares and who celebrates creation with genuine faith. One who can also, when the moment calls for it, configure worlds in which to escape for a while and lose oneself among harmonious ranges of greens, pinks, and violets—colors that fade, that become vapor, that delimit no surface and move with the sun, redrawing the canvas without fatigue.

The work of Katherine Hurley reminds us that not everything in the world is horror; that we can still respond to beauty, pause, sink into the landscapes she has captured across so many surfaces, and give thanks.

Above all, to her.

Thank you very much, Kay!