Kathy Loomis: Daily Art is Good for You!

For the last 20 years Kathy Loomis has been doing daily art in various mediums and techniques including hand-stitching, collage, quilting, photography, drawing, calligraphy and mail art.  She will show examples of her daily art and why she thinks the discipline and format of daily art is great for anybody who wants to improve artistic skills and sensibilities. Kathy’s daily art has greatly influenced her mixed-media and 3-D art.  She will also show us some of her art quilts and share how her daily art has given her a broader context in which to evaluate and think about her quilts.

Kathy spent her career in Louisville, KY as a newspaper journalist and then a writer and editor for an international consulting firm. Since retiring, she has worked full-time as an artist.   

Kathy learned sewing, embroidery and other kinds of handwork from her grandmothers and made her own clothes for 30 years. She is a self-taught quilter, starting her first quilt in high school using leftovers from garment sewing. Decades ago when she decided to get serious about quilts as art, she stopped sewing clothing but still loves mending.  

Kathy’s work has been shown in both quilt and all-media shows in the US and Europe.  Several pieces have been included in juried exhibits organized by Studio Art Quilt Associates, which have toured extensively on four continents.  One of her works was included in Quilt National ’09 and won the prestigious Quilts Japan Prize.  That quilt is now in the permanent collection of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln NE. 

 After several years of working exclusively with quilts, her practice broadened to include mixed media art in both two and three dimensions.  She has made daily art every year since 2003, in several different mediums, and has returned to the hand stitching that she learned as a child, but with fewer rules and a lot more originality.  

She writes about art and life in her blog, Art With a Needle, posts all her daily art on Kathy’s Daily Art and posts daily to Instagram:  @kathy_in_ky