Growing up in Mississippi in a family of storytellers and writers, Kathy McCullen discovered the world of her imagination early in life and has been passionate about art for as long as she can remember. Primarily a self-taught painter, Kathy studied art, literature, and special education at Mississippi State University and had a long career as a teacher. Initially, Kathy focused on art as a therapeutic tool for her students with emotional and learning challenges and taught children's art classes privately and in community schools. Ten years ago, however, Kathy began concentrating on her own painting and her bold, colorful work can be seen in private and corporate collections across the United States and Europe and featured in national art publications.
At heart a colorist, Kathy enjoys experimenting with media and techniques and has developed a highly original, appealing style of her own. She has focused on subjects as various as: sea, land, harbors, and boats, as well as florals and people, always striking a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction. Kathy applies layers of paint with a palette knife and uses oil sticks, ink, graphite, and charcoal to achieve opaque and translucent layers and to create structures from the happy accidents that occur. In her process, compositions build themselves, as Kathy allows intuition to guide the evolution of each painting.. Kathy says, " Inspiration and essence are as important to me as the end product. I become completely absorbed with my subject, as colors and shapes reveal themselves, in the process creating, deconstructing, and painting over, until what I have been looking for is finally found."
