Kathryn grew up in Tulsa, OK before moving to Los Angeles to pursue art and design. While studying at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising and UCLA, she was recruited to model for the preeminent Ford agency in New York and spent the next decade working with top designers, magazines, and photographers in the US and Europe.
After moving to San Diego to raise a family, she resumed her fine art studies at UCSD, taught art and art history at Bird Rock Elementary, and spent decades raising funds for various nonprofits in San Diego including chairing the Jewel Ball – ARTRAGEOUS, being Campaign Manager for the Arts Education Center at The New Children’s Museum, and Co-Chairing the Sanford-Burnham Medical Institute’s The Power to Cure Gala. Now retired from professional fundraising, Stephens is focused on painting full time.
STATEMENT
La Jolla artist, Kathryn Stephens is mindful of how climate change and habitat loss are reshaping the wild places she loves. Kathryn paints the untouched, complex tangle of shapes and colors found in overgrown and wild spaces. These are not manicured gardens or postcard views, but the dense, unruly beauty of growth left to its own logic — vines overtaking fences, roots breaking through stone, color pressing up through shadow.
These paintings function as a kind of sanctuary — a place to slow down inside an increasingly fast, fragmented world. But they are also a form of advocacy. By asking viewers to really look at the intricate detail of a single tangled corner of the earth, she hopes to renew a sense of connection to the natural world, and a shared urgency around protecting it amid climate change and diminishing biodiversity.