By Kathie Odom
Today’s article is by Walland, Tennessee, artist Kathie Odom Kathie Odom. Kathie is a well-loved and seasoned professional plein air painter. This week, she is in the Great Smoky Mountains for this year’s Plein Air Convention & Expo. Join her below in a plunge into plein air adventure beginning with her painting, “Down River.” (above)
Ah… Elkmont in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. After pulling our camper through the entrance we always roll our windows down, take a deep breath, and say to each other, Welcome home! I painted this piece (“Down River”) at campsite J-8 with my feet in the water. The collector told me this painting looked just like a place she went to with her family while growing up. Come to find out, it is the same place!
“Log Some Time”
As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to paint John Oliver’s homestead in Cades Cove. We hiked in early one morning before cars were allowed access and, doggone it, I left every brush at home! I scrounged deep into my gear box to find one that had been given to me… a short, thick-bristled unused brush. It was nothing like my airy, scraggly #279 Masters Choice Long Flats by Rosemary & Co., but I had the best time with that one little brush anyway. The paint did exactly what I wanted… it just flowed. Toward the end, I bent over and plucked a few blades of grass at my feet to use for painting in the hair-like weeds in the foreground. What insecurities I can have when missing the tools I’ve grown to love. Where there is a will, there is a way!
Kathie Odom, “Log Some Time,” 2018, 12 x 12 in., plein air
“Ferris Huff’s Place”
It is common to begin meaningful relationships with someone who purchases a piece of your art. I was truly flattered and touched when a highly respected artist and his wife bought this plein air piece. One year later we were able to borrow it from them to get a photo for this book and then deliver it back to them in Alabama. We saw their home. We saw where he paints. And we saw where this piece hangs, amidst so many other beautiful paintings. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything!
Kathie Odom, “Ferris Huff’s Place,” 2019, 12 x 20 in., plein air
“Sun Day”
In early 2020 my husband Buddy and I moved to a small mountain farm in Walland, Tennessee. All of a sudden, I no longer had any motivation to stand behind an easel because I was now living in a painting. So, I pulled out the largest canvas I could find and a photo of sunflowers, some even drooping and bent to the ground. The simple joy of color completely reenergized me and helped get me out of the painting funk I was in.
Kathie Odom, “Sun Day,” 2020, 25 x 40 in., studio
“Elkmont’s Winter”
“Here I am in one of my favorite places on earth with my feet in the snow,” Odom says of ‘Elkmont’s Winter.’ “What fun! This is the first plein air piece I painted without instruction and the very first piece I ever sold. This cabin no longer stands, which makes me treasure the moment even more.”
Kathie Odom, “Elkmont’s Winter,” 2010, 12 x 24 in., plein air
These are excerpts from Kathie’s book of 112 reflective paintings, “Let the Art Speak.” Page after page displays quiet scenes of rural life that some of us will recognize, and others will yearn for. Her works show us barns full of history and tall tales, fields full of wind-touched grass, and streams that must be full of crawdads and minnows.
Get your copy of “Let the Art Speak” at kathieodom.com/books and get a closer look at many more plein air paintings and Odom’s comments for an even closer understanding. ~CherieDawn Haas
And, learn more about Odom’s painting techniques for “nostalgic impressionism” with the art video workshop, Bold Brushwork (available here).
Plein Air Close to Home
By
Kelly Kane, Editor-in-Chief, PleinAir MagazineSave
Joe Paquet, featured in the PleinAir Magazine article “Absolutely Real but Not Photographic” (April / May 2024 issue). Joe is leading a pre-convention workshop at the upcoming Plein Air Convention & Expo.
An excerpt from PleinAir Magazine’s Editor’s Letter this month:
Close to Home
Just a few hundred miles from where I live, the Great Smoky Mountains — the site for this year’s Plein Air Convention & Expo — feel like home. From the time I was little, my parents had taken my sisters and me to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for family vacations. As an adult, I’ve taken my own daughters to the area for hiking, shopping, and visiting the sites around Cherokee and Asheville, North Carolina.
Charles Krutch (1849–1934), “Mt. LeConte,” Oil on board, 20 1/2 x 35 1/2 Knoxville Museum of Art.
East Tennessee’s Charles Krutch earned the nickname “Corot of the South” for the soft, atmospheric watercolor and oil paintings of the Smoky Mountains that served as his sole focus. Completely self-taught, he often applied thick layers of paint with his fingers to capture the changing moods of the mountains.
For artist Kathie Odom, the connection is even closer, with the park lying just outside her back door. In “Of Mist and Memory,” she reveals what makes the Smokies so special and lets us in on a few of her favorite painting spots.
“There is a simplicity and quiet waiting for me each time I drive into the Smokies,” she says. “A nostalgia for the old Appalachian way of life wants to jump in the car with me. I roll the windows down, breathe the fresh mountain air, and think to myself, welcome home.”
Whether you find joy and inspiration close to home or further afield, here’s to the start of another successful season of plein air!
