Northwest Modernists, Spokane and American Artists | Northwest Modernists | Kathleen Gemberling Adkison (Northwest Art Collection: Works On Paper)

Northwest Art Collection: Works On Paper

Northwest Modernists, Spokane and American Artists : Northwest Modernists : Kathleen Gemberling Adkison

Name: Kathleen Gemberling Adkison

Nationality: American

Affiliations: Spokane Artist

Kathleen Gemberling Adkison was born to recreational parents in Beatrice, Nebraska and her earliest memories include family excursions into nature. She moved with her parents to Seattle in 1936, attended West Seattle High School, and began to study privately at night with the regionalist realist artist Leon Berbyshire. Richard E. Fuller, the founding director of the Seattle Art Museum curated her first museum exhibition and introduced her to Mark Tobey around 1960. Her life and art changed after that. Mark Tobey became her most influential teacher. She studied privately with Tobey and Morris Graves from 1946 until 1950. In 1948 she moved to Spokane, becoming steeped in the stark geological landscape of the Spokane area where she was able to begin "thinking, seeing, and painting with a heightened sense of self." In the basement of her house she brushed, pooled, poured, and dripped paint onto fully stretched and primed canvases set on the floor. She created "Change-Over," what Matthew Kangas calls "her first fully successful abstract painting," for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair exhibition. Kathleen Gemberling Adkison is considered, after Clyfford Still, the major modernist painter to emerge from eastern Washington, abstracting rocks and vegetation into lusterous oil paintings that remain close to the ecological "mysticism" of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. Although she has never discussed her work in terms of mystical symbolism, her artwork emerges from a profound reverence for nature. The Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture owns four oil paintings spanning Adkison's career in addition to one work on paper. The Museum mounted a late career retrospective for the artist in 1999. Sources: Matthew Kangas, Kathleen Gemberling Adkison: A Retrospective, Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, 1999. Matthew Kangas, Modernism and Beyond: Women Artists of the Pacific Northwest [electronic document] (LaConner, Washington: The Museum of Northwest Art, accessed 16 July 2006); available from http://www.museumofnwart.org/ collection/ nwartists_ detail.html?id=6; Internet.