A few years ago, I had the chance to interview plein air painter Kathie Odom for The Artists Magazine. In the magazine, I wrote:
Viewing the paintings of native Tennessee artist Kathie Odom is like taking a drive through rural America, passing by family farms that have seen better days. Old barns with sun-warped siding and tin roofs starting to peel back; log cabins with wide bands of chinking in need of repair; weed-thick gardens with a few wire tomato baskets, forgotten after the last harvest. An organic messiness, lovely in its unpredictable growth, has begun to surround the farms.Odom paints this with a loose brush, art imitating nature in all its vegetative energy. Look longer, and you'll start to feel a wistful hankering for times gone by.
Last year, at the Plein Air Convention & Expo in Santa Fe, I ran into Kathie and her husband, Buddy. We had a delightful talk (even though I was wearing my pandemic mask), and she let me know that she had just published a retrospective of her work, Kathie Odom: Let the Art Speak. I was delighted a few weeks later to receive a copy.
The book runs to nearly 200 pages, with each page beautifully printed. The paintings are organized chronologically and, in keeping with the title, the artist lets the art speak for itself and keeps her remarks brief. As I pored over the paintings, page by page, my vision of the world she inhabits and paints in grew. Many of the paintings resonated with my own memories of the South: hoeing corn with my grandparents on their truck farm in Mississippi; catching lightning bugs on sweltering summer nights with my cousins in Arkansas; driving with my family through the blue hills of Appalachia and in awe of the mountains of kudzu weighing down abandoned tobacco barns.
Kathie Odom: Let the Art Speak is a real treasure. It's available from the artist: https://www.kathieodom.com/book/3860/let-the-art-speak-by-kathie-odom
