Blue Rain Gallery Durango was delighted to welcome Kathryn Stedham back for her third visit to our Durango location. This time, she joined us for a live artist demonstration and solo exhibition during Noel Night, Durango’s beloved annual holiday celebration.
Hosted by Local First, Noel Night takes place throughout downtown Durango on the first Friday of December, inviting the community to shop locally, gather, and celebrate together. Established in 2002 in response to the Missionary Ridge Fire, Noel Night has grown into a powerful expression of local resilience and community spirit.
The evening was filled with lively, thoughtful conversation as Stedham worked on a painting live in the gallery, offering guests a rare glimpse into her creative process. Her latest body of work features striking mesas and horses set against the dramatic landscapes of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.
At the heart of Stedham’s practice is a profound relationship with the land itself. “I learned how to find my own voice within the landscape,” she shares. “You can’t hide here. You’re laid open. I found the landscape to be an energetic force in my life. When I’m out in it, I feel small. I dissolve into the vastness.” This sense of humility and urgency drives her to portray spaces that are rapidly changing, rooting out what she calls the “mystic snippets of a quickly vanishing landscape.”
This approach to landscape is uniquely Stedham’s. She spends several days each week immersed in the land, closely observing color, form, and atmosphere. Often painting en plein air, she brings that same immediacy into the studio, relying on her finely tuned visual memory rather than preliminary sketches or photographs to guide her work.
Stedham’s deep observational skill has been honed over a lifetime of painting. She sold her first painting at age eight and began exhibiting professionally straight out of high school. Today, she is known for her extraordinary ability to witness a landscape, storm, or fleeting cloud formation and later return to her palette with striking accuracy, instinctively mixing the precise colors needed to bring that moment back to life.
Throughout Noel Night, Stedham generously shared her process, inspiration, and stories with the Durango community, creating an atmosphere of warmth, curiosity, and connection. The evening was a joyful celebration of art, place, and presence, reflecting the spirit of Noel Night and the enduring power of landscape painting to connect us to something larger than ourselves.
