DVAA Member since 2024
Kathy Moss-Reeves
Website: kathymossreeves.com/kmr-artist
About:
Kathy Moss-Reeves likes to keep things simple regarding her art. Cut the bullshit. Feel something. Tell a story and make it come alive.
Kathy started making puppets at age seven. Charged admission. When puppets no longer held her interest, she began painting rocks. For profit. Every rock had a story.
It wasn't long before she moved into large scale performance art. Believing her mother’s couch looked good enough to eat, she spread mustard over its entirety. It was not as delicious as she imagined. Artists understand a setback. It forges them.
Her enterprising led to high school drawing and painting classes. Enough college to earn two degrees in art. Museums, galleries, awards of distinction, best in show. Thirty-two years of teaching art at every academic level, from kindergarten to grad school.
Kathy lives and paints in South Philadelphia. Beautiful and honest people. Proud brick buildings and narrow streets. Little reminders everywhere of stories yet to be told.
She works every day in her studio. There are no couches here.
Artist Statement:
I have a vivid, very early childhood memory when I dumped a bottle of vanilla extract into a mixing bowl, added sugar, and topped it off with a handful of pink tissues for a little accent of color. I presumed some level of magical alchemy would occur, and soon a cake would replace the mess in the bowl. This was not the first time I had gone rogue with household materials. Shortly after that incident, my parents intervened with arts supplies and supervised lessons to address my interest in experimentation and a penchant to create stuff. It was a success.
Although my path was perhaps diverted from a Chef’s career, it is evident to me that many strong similarities exist between the two disciplines. Some examples: 1. The process begins with a sense of predicted outcome but can adapt to necessary revisions. 2. It’s helpful to have a competent comprehension of science/chemistry and function of raw materials. 3. The need for specific tools and equipment for various stages of production. 4. To know the history and cultural contributions of our profession in order to move forward. But what I fell in love with when learning art techniques was, and still is, feeling absolute joy during the production stage. Bottom line, process is my motivating factor for creating art.
A recent epiphany regarding process came to me when Chef Samin Nosrat’s book title Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was brought to my attention. She identified these 4 universal simple ingredients as essential to cooking, no matter what culture she addressed. I was inspired and identified parallel components in my compositions that appear with consistency: light, color, space, and figure.
The possibilities to manipulate variations of these elements such as size, emphasis, placement, shape, etc., should keep me occupied for at least another decade.
Thank you, Chef
