In fact, she makes a conscious effort to support North American manufacturers and give back to local communities. Stephens said she loves connecting with wonderful people, learning their stories and connecting with their communities. The channel's goal is to be fashionable and educational. To that end, Stephens has an 80,000-subscriber YouTube channel called Kate's Ag - Farm to Fashion that goes behind the scenes of what farmers do. She incorporates agricultural elements into her designs and hopes to remind people that cotton starts on a farm and leather starts on a ranch. So, Stephens started a contemporary handbag line that bridges the gap between farmers and consumers through fashion. She said she was driving a combine on her family's wheat farm when she got to thinking about how not many people know where their fashion comes from. Stephens, whose family has been in Montana since 1912, comes from an agricultural background. When Stephen McKenna died in May 2017, plans were already well-advanced for this survey exhibition of his work.Fire Within: Award winners include YouTube star Kate Stephens, Traci Rosenbaum Great Falls TribuneĪt 17, Kate Stephens is the youngest nominee and winner of the Fire Within award, and she's already making big waves in the business community. In fact, the artist himself selected the works and planned the layout. Although it is titled A Painter’s Life, it’s important to say at the outset that it is not a retrospective exhibition as such. Far too many of McKenna’s signature works are not included, and whole aspects of his artistic personality are absent so that, even given the autobiographical thread running through the show, it was clearly never intended as a comprehensive retrospective. That is in keeping with the nature of the artist. McKenna was one of those valuable, stimulating individuals for whom life is an ongoing process of inquiry. Everything he ever did was a work in progress, and this exhibition is no exception. That said, it is a melancholy pleasure to see a mind, and an eye, so intensely engaged while knowing that the process has come to a close. The remarkable exhibition he curated at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 1997, The Pursuit of Painting, featuring the work of 26 painters, precursors and contemporaries – an alphabet making up a language of painting – provided a perfect illustration of his attitude. His broad and generous selection encompassed a wide church, from Gwen John to Sean Scully, Paula Rego to Ciaran Lennon. What mattered to him was that a painter be instinctively committed to the argument, absolutely locked into the argument that is involved in the process of making a painting. He wasn’t precluding anything.Įmma Lucy O’Brien, the curator of A Painter’s Life, quotes McKenna from 1980: “Painting is the art of decoration and representation – of making images of ourselves and the world surrounding us, and making them visible to the sense and intelligence of others.” It’s not a strict definition, he adds, but it should serve as a starting point. The very earliest works of his on view are straightforwardly representational. When he attended the Slade in London from 1959 into the 1960s, he absorbed an abstract, modernist aesthetic that was simply at odds with his sensibility. The more abstract works included in the show demonstrate how he quickly recast, or perhaps learned to interpret, abstraction as a pictorial means of making models of the world: there’s no way for him to keep the world out. As regards representation per se, there is in his work from the beginning a quality that remained constant: a dogged, almost pedantic fidelity to the phenomenal evidence that could resemble naivety. Perhaps it was naivety, if consciously, stubbornly so. That the show is on in Carlow makes sense because McKenna was, from the latter part of the 1990s, a local. He settled in Bagenalstown, on the river Barrow, “without doubt a vision of Arcadia”, as he put it, without irony. Always interested in the role of geography in shaping sensibility, he was never nationalistically inclined, seeing himself, though born in England, as a citizen of Europe and a participant in and descendant of classical civilization. While his father was a British army officer, and McKenna himself had a certain martial bearing, it was never likely that he would pursue a military career. His father was from Tyrone and his mother was Scottish. There were family links to Donegal and when his father retired to Donegal in the 1970s, McKenna visited often, and stayed and painted. Growing up, he became used to periodic relocation depending on his father’s postings – they included Norway, Hong Kong and Austria – and he developed and retained a liking for travel.
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