Bio

“I have been engaged as a landscape painter since my first artist’s residency in Scandinavia in 1995 when I spent three months in Iceland.  I was initially drawn to the formidable landscapes that echoed the landforms I paint here along Colorado’s front range--forceful, rugged, and starkly beautiful masses.  Since that initial visit, I have become fascinated with the complexity of light, wind, and weather found in both geographies and, in addition, relationships at the edge of land and sea.  Throughout the past 16 years, I have returned to Iceland, Finland and Sweden.  These trips are the foundation of my studio practice and have led to productive professional relationships with the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, the Saimaa University of Applied Sciences, in Finland, and the Valand School of Art at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.”  

Kate Leonard directs the Graphics Research Lab at Colorado College, an innovative interdisciplinary printmaking and design program.  Although born and raised in New York City, she is a dual citizen of Australia and the U.S. and has traveled frequently between these two distant homelands. After she completed an undergraduate liberal arts degree at Grinnell College, she went on for specialized training in printmaking and studied with Karen Kunc at the University of Nebraska receiving her M.F.A. in 1994.  Leonard’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and abroad, and in 2008 she received an American Scandinavian Foundation Grant for her innovative photographic transfer paintings.  She lives and works in Manitou Springs at the foothills of Pikes Peak and the Rocky Mountain Range.