Kate Dardine paints contemporary rural America, specializing in barns and horses. Through Kate’s imaginative use of color and composition, Kate shares her love of the rural life in a style that lends a contemporary voice to traditional subjects. Painting in both pastels and oils, Kate employs a technique she describes as creating order out of chaos. Beginning with a rough sketch of her subject, Kate then freely applies vibrant, emotional color to the canvas or paper, and slowly brings this chaotic beginning to a finished work, maintaining the joy and passion she first felt when starting. “I begin each painting with an intuitive feeling of how it will turn out. They all go through a scary phase, much like they feeling you get on a galloping horse, when you are flying along, not quite sure whether the horse will ever stop. When everything comes together, and you look back on the ride - well, there’s nothing like it!”
Kate earned a degree in Illustration from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, studying with noted illustrators Bob Crofut and Bob Dacey. Since moving to Ft. Collins in 1988, Kate has studied with Patti André and Clive Tyler. She lists the work of contemporary artists Wolf Kahn, Leigh Gusterson and Lani Vlaanderen as influences in her work.
Kate is a member of the Northern Colorado Artist Association, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Pastel Society of Colorado. An award winning artist, Kate is represented by The Collective Fine Art Gallery in Fort Collins and is in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad. When not painting, Kate enjoys riding her horses, playing with her dogs and exploring the “road less traveled.”
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