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04/11/2018 08:30 AMWhen Kathy Axilrod looks at ripening fruit in the market, it may not be to eat. It’s more likely she needs it to paint. Her vibrant still lifes feature oranges, apples, plums, and pears. She especially loves painting pears.
“Great shapes; great colors,” she says.
As for taste?
“They’re better for painting than eating,” Kathy admits.
Her still lifes have eggplants, persimmons, and strawberries, but never one of the most popular fruits: bananas.
“They rot too fast,” she says.
Still, she sometimes uses strawberries, though she allows that they too “rot in a minute.”
Kathy’s paintings, a selection not only of still lifes, but of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits, will be on exhibit at the Art Gallery at Essex Meadows until Sunday, April 29. The show, titled Painting’s My Life, is open to the public.
Kathy has exhibited her paintings at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Maryland. Her pictures are part of collections of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine and City University of New York. In Connecticut, her work has appeared at UConn Avery Point as well as in galleries in Greenwich, Chester, Old Saybrook, Essex, and Old Lyme.
All Kathy’s paintings show her focus on the subtleties of color and the interplay of geometric shapes. At 90, Kathy still paints every morning, starting at 9:30 a.m. and finishing at 1:30 p.m. Though she takes a few breaks, she says she puts in a solid three hours of work.
Since she now has to sit rather than stand when she paints, she can no longer do the large four-by five-foot canvases she once enjoyed.
“I miss that,” she says.
One large canvas in the present exhibits shows dancing at a family wedding in all its robust energy.
“I want paintings to be alive, I like mob scenes,” she says. “I’m not a minimalist. I like space, color, brush stroke, and shapes.”
As a child, Kathy says she liked to draw, but did not have plans to be an artist. At the University of Chicago, she majored in economics.
“I was a Depression kid. I wanted to study economics to avoid future depressions, to build roads, help agriculture, do good,” she explains. “I don’t think that was unusual at the time. A lot of the guys returning from World War II wanted to do good in the world.”
She met her husband Stephen at Chicago in the graduate economics program and while he completed his doctoral work, Kathy got a master’s degree, but did not go further.
“I discovered economics was not for me,” she says.
Her art career started with a surprise. When the couple lived in Bethesda, Maryland, Steve came home one day with an announcement: He had registered Kathy for a painting class at American University. She had known nothing about it. The class met on Saturday so he could stay home to take care of the children. Kathy and Steve now have three adult children, two sons and a daughter.
When the children were young and Kathy painted at home, they sometimes sat beneath the easel as she worked.
“I was a clean painter. I didn’t drip,” she recalls.
By the time the kids were teens, the Axilrods had added a studio to their house.
Caring for family, and taking one course at a time, Kathy spent 10 years getting her master of fine arts degree. When she was finished with the degree, she taught art for 20 years at Montgomery College, a community college in Maryland.
Kathy and Steve moved to New York after his government career of more than 30 years with the Federal Reserve system, where he was staff director for Monetary and Financial Policy, and staff director and secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee. Steve went into private business. Kathy painted New York City.
Sometimes she painted from photographs she took from the window of the upper-floor Manhattan apartment in which a friend lived. She even used photographs in real estate advertisements when they were taken from high enough elevations—”Like the Marriott near 42nd Street,” she says.
Kathy liked to depict city scenes in the late afternoon, a time she describes as a magic hour.
“It’s just before night comes, all blue; the quiet before the evening traffic,” she says.
She points out details of the pictures to a visitor—a view of Times Square, with the bright lights of cars coming toward the viewer and the dimmer tail lights of those going in the other direction. The buildings, which Kathy describes as geometrically rendered, are often black, but don’t appear as monolithic darkness; instead they show different shadings.
“They’re all different blacks, not dead pigment. I never have dead pigment. I enliven it,” she says.
At the home Kathy and Steve owned in Lyme for many years, she spent summers painting landscapes. She recalls people asking her about local restaurants and shops, but she seldom knew them.
“I spent my weekends painting, never exploring the neighborhood,” she says.
Some 10 months ago, the couple moved to Essex Meadows.
“I love it; they do the marketing and the cooking. I have more time to paint,” she says.
Some of her artwork is now displayed on her website, kathyaxilrod.com. A friend, who owns what Kathy describes as a “fantastic” camera, took photographs of her pictures for the site, but Kathy retook them all using her iPhone.
“The ones I took on the iPhone came out better. I think iPhones are amazing,” she says.
Kathy reacts with animation to a question about whether she plans to stop painting as her 91st birthday approaches.
“Am I going to stop? Heaven’s no. I’m obsessive about it. It is my life,” she says.
And, of course, that’s why it is the name of her current show.
Painting’s My Life, an Exhibit of the Paintings of Katherine Axilrod, is at the Essex Meadows Gallery until Sunday, April 29; entry to the gallery, 30 Bokum Road, Essex, is free and open to the public. For more information on the artist, visit kathyaxilrod.com.