An Artist's Eye

Kathy Moss's Beautiful Botanicals

From an early age I have been strongly drawn to art and artists, so I sometimes wonder why I didn’t become an artist instead of an author. Perhaps it’s because what I admired most is an artist’s creativity and courage to express individualistic insights and experiences with imagery. Or maybe it’s because when I learned to decipher little black squiggles on paper, I became very interested in the stories and ideas revealed by words. Whatever the reason, certain images continue to inspire me to do more with my writing—to dig deeper into my thoughts and feelings and then to try to express them as well as possible.

What is it about an artist’s images that makes you catch your breath and startles you into becoming aware of a deeper perception? Whatever it is, Kathy Moss’s gorgeous artwork makes it happen for me.

Untitled, Number 610, 2025, 40” high by 60” wide, oil on linen

Maybe it’s because of their beauty, which has always been an important part of art; it’s what made the young Georgia O’Keeffe start painting again after an art professor with an appreciation for Asian art spoke about filling space in a beautiful way. Moss prefers to leave verbalizing about her work to writers—“painting is much deeper than anything I could say about it in words”—but she has offered that “I am aiming for the sublime; to make sure something is so beautiful that it is nearly too much.”

Her elegant iconography is botanical in nature—the floral form, closed or open or spent. An unopened bud suggests potential and a bloom frailty, while a dried pod implies death. We see levitating rose buds—or maybe they are rose pods—almost touching. Daisies in full bloom dancing across the surface of a painting together or apart. Little trees that are really pine cones. Larger than life rudbeckias past their prime, held aloft with what looks like wings, in exquisite relationship to each other.

Moss places her images in imaginative arrangements, not necessarily those of nature. Her palette is muted and minimalist with the florals almost always rendered in dark brown on light backgrounds. They are gathered together and then unleashed, isolated and repeated. Tension vibrates between them or is released in what the artist calls a “little drama.” She observes that the buds or pods in her larger paintings are the size of human heads as, she adds intriguingly, “all art is self-portraiture.”

Untitled, Number 602, 2025, 72”high by 48” wide, oil on linen

Her sensuous pale backgrounds thick with paint reveal fascinating hints about her process. The Renaissance recipe she uses for chalk and oil grounds over linen has “a dry surface that absorbs paint and shows every erasure as a ghostly veil of subtle color.” Glistening surfaces thicken and change as she adds pigment and deletes it with turpentine, leaving evidence of changes in the form of scratches, halos, inexplicable marks, and drips that often look like tears. “I like anything that serves to display the passage of time spent on the image as well as the struggle to find it,” she says.

It’s evident that during the past two decades Moss has put in her ten thousand hours, the minimum amount of time said to be necessary to acquire mastery of anything. It took what she describes as a “long and often frustrating search” for a way to express “authenticity, for the combination of form, materials and method that would convey the indescribable in my experience.”

The artist calls herself a renegade gardener and a passionate ecologist, who observes invasives overwhelming native species. Her artwork expresses an awareness of both fragile hope and deep grief, so I find its quivering beauty inspiring. An exhibition, “Transcendence,” with her work is on display at Argazzi Art, 22 Millerton Rd., Lakeville, Connecticut. She has upcoming exhibitions this December at the Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho and in March 2026 at Pryor Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, go to her website: kathymoss.com.

Nowadays the expression of heightened creativity like Kathy Moss’s is perhaps a way for a human being to outwit AI, or at least for a way for artists and authors to attempt to distinguish their work from the artificial thinking of chatbots, in the view of Michael Castleman, the author of The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing. So if artists often decline to explain their artwork in words, authors can become enriched by writing about them, as I did when writing about Kathy Moss and in my biographies of Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Nevelson.