4 minute read
A Gift to Share: How Kathleen Leitner tapped back into painting in Camphill Ghent
Since moving to Camphill Ghent 12 years ago, Kathleen Leitner has been able to accomplish a great many things. She’s fostered a community garden space our elders can work in and harvest from. She’s relieved her rheumatoid arthritis symptoms through wholesome meals and juices using berries she grows on our property. And she’s found the time and support to rediscover a long lost love.
“I think you know me as a gardener. I was a farmer’s wife, really,” she said. “But when I grew up, I was encouraged to be an artist.”
Kathleen comes from a line of artists, including a great grandmother who was a photographer, and her grandfather, who made his living as a painter during the Great Depression. Kathleen was fortunate to inherit his art materials.
By high school, Kathleen wasn’t excelling in academics, but she was already a prolific painter. Her parents helped her to apply to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She was quickly accepted, and headed to Boston at the age of 18.
“And it was great except for one thing. I painted landscapes and at that time people were painting soup cans and throwing paint at the wall,” she said. “And they kind of looked at it like I wasn’t going anywhere with art because I wasn’t buying into the popular idea of what art was.”
Kathleen stayed true to her love of landscapes, with trees at the center of her focus.
“I’ve always loved trees and that started from the times we went to Lake Michigan, and I sat and watched the sunrise and heard the water,” she reminisced. “I was up on the dunes among some white pines, and I would watch the branches moving.”
Her paintings are vibrant. Some are watercolor, some are oil, and many are screen prints. All seem to be moving.
“To me, everything is always moving, and I’m kind of showing that with the way I paint,” she said. “I love to paint to music, because the painting then takes on the movement of the music.”
Kathleen’s paintings were featured for a month in the Joan Allen Art Gallery at Camphill Ghent. Anyone living in or visiting our Adult Home for one of our gatherings or cultural performances walked through a breathtaking forest of river birches in winter and willows bowing over the pond near Kathleen’s apartment in Camphill Ghent.
“The work you’re seeing here in the gallery are works that I’ve done—most of them in the last four or five months because I decided to start painting again,” she said. “And I did that by going to our painting class here. I was shocked I was still able to paint. It had been a few years, and this winter, I sat at my drawing table and painted every single day.”
When Kathleen paints, she loses herself in her work. In summer she’s on her knees in the garden, but her winters in Camphill Ghent are spent at her painting table.
“Painting takes time, and when I paint, I forget. I don’t remember lunch, I don’t remember any task or any appointment I have. I just stay there and I paint,” she said. “It’s like working on a puzzle you cannot stop working on.”
After attending art school in Boston, Kathleen majored in silk screen print making at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, using many of the materials she had inherited from her grandfather.
“I really enjoy working with silk screen,” she said. “It makes you think backwards, and I do that naturally.”
Kathleen made a living with different jobs after college and also raised a family. It had been many years since Kathleen was able to dedicate so much time to her craft.
She pointed to one of the first pieces she created in painting class in Camphill Ghent.
“This is my second painting I did in painting class here in Camphill Ghent, and that’s how I jump started myself this year to start painting again,” she said. “This winter I did like 39 paintings. I was really excited and I kind of got out of the box, too.”
If you’d like to receive email updates about what’s on display in our Joan Allen Art Gallery, please visit camphillghent.org/publications
