FIELD

KATHERINE STRAUSE

Outdoor art exhibit featuring paintings of women, including one of an archer aiming a bow, set against green trees at sunset.
A painting of two young women with one aiming a bow and arrow, set against a background of green trees.

Commissioned, produced, and directed by the studio. Katherine Strause, eleven canvases. Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2020–21.

Galleries were closed. The art world was adapting, badly. I had been looking at Katherine Strause’s paintings for a while and could not stop.

She has a brushstroke that is entirely hers. Every canvas is built over an orange undercoat that pushes the color forward like heat. Women with bows drawn against saturated skies. Work that alive doesn’t want a white wall. It wants air, sun, a horizon. So I went to Katherine with a proposal: paint a body of work for that setting. Eleven canvases, made for a sloping Arkansas field, to stand in real wind and real light. The painted skies met the actual one.

Then we filmed it. A professional crew, a drone moving over the field, so the show could travel to anyone anywhere at a moment when nobody could go anywhere. It arrived expansive. An experience, not a JPEG. The paintings sold.

This is the essential work of the studio. We fund shows. We produce exhibitions and experiences for artists we believe in and put the work in front of the people who should be living with it. Making and living stop being two separate things. In a field, that looks like this.

Colorful painting of a woman holding a sword, displayed outdoors with trees in the background.
A painting on a wooden panel displaying a circular target with concentric rings and a lion face at the center, set outdoors on grass with trees and bushes in the background.
Outdoor art display with three paintings on stands on grassy field in front of a dense green forest.
A painting of a woman with curly hair aiming a bow and arrow, with a sky filled with orange and light blue clouds background, displayed outdoors on an easel.