Art of Kathryn Myers

Another of my favorite professors at U.Conn. - where she has been teaching since 1984 - was Kathryn Myers. She taught a great drawing class and had a wonderfully inclusive definition of the word. I did a lot of collaging, some of it three-dimensional. Most memorable was a full-sized casket crafted out of cardboard and covered with all the idioms about death that I could come up with: dead as a doornail, death warmed over, dead wrong, that sort of thing - carried into the classroom by four volunteer pall-bearers! At the time, Kathryn was painting very eerie oversize canvases, and when she brought the class to her studio, we understood why. Her studio was located in the Mansfield Training Academy, an abandoned mental health facility. Most recently, her inspiration has been her travels in India. She told me she has witnessed cremations on the Ganges, but photographing these rituals is frowned upon. The images above are from her digital portfolio.