Artist Kate Schultz’s recent show in Greenville, S.C., featuring a series of landscapes, was aptly entitled “The Scenic Route.”
Schultz takes her lead and artistic inspiration from something as simple as an early-morning walk through her South Charlotte neighborhood or from staring out over her backyard garden.
“I get inspiration from the neighborhood, different people’s houses,” she says. “We have a little forest near our house, so I’ll take nature walks back there. I see a lot of animals. I would say my garden is my biggest inspiration.”
Her love of nature shines through in the collection shown at the Spoonbill Gallery in West Greenville, named for the bright pink wading birds that populate the salt marshes of South Carolina’s Low Country.
Schultz grew up in Jackson, Miss. and studied art at the University of Mississippi. At first, she painted part-time after work and sold pieces strictly by word of mouth. By the end of 2019, she and her husband were ready for a change and were drawn to the outdoors of North Carolina. She took a job in holistic health and painted on the weekends, before deciding to go full-time during the pandemic.
Schultz and her husband bought their home in 2020 and began work on what would become the biggest inspiration for her subject matter, a backyard garden.
For the average person, looking out over a backyard the size of a little less than one acre might get mundane day after day, but not to someone with the artistic and nature-loving eye of Schultz, who relishes spending time outdoors and nurturing her garden.
Her garden features everything from vegetables to fruit bushes to herbs like rosemary and sage, basil and parsley, which bring all the more flavor to her vegetarian lifestyle.
Schultz might take the most inspiration from the most dynamic element of their garden: the wildflowers.
“I've just let the wildflowers do their own thing,” says Schultz, who loves perennial natives like echinacea, black-eyed susans and blanket flowers. “Sometimes things come up, and sometimes they don't. It’s interesting just to see the way they move around the garden. And some things won't come back every year, and some will, and some are odd varieties with unique colors. I just love that.”
She and her husband like to do the garden chores before sunrise. He waters the vegetables, she handles the herbs and flowers. By 9 or 10 a.m., she’s ready to get some ideas down on canvas.
“I usually try to get my inspiration from the early mornings,” she says. “The whole neighborhood is quiet. We have bird baths and houses in our backyard, so we have different types of native birds that come out. We’ve got bunnies that roam around. The sun rises right in the middle of our garden, so the lighting is really nice.”
Schultz, who now paints full-time, begins by sketching and drawing her ideas before getting into acrylic paint. She likes getting something on canvas nearly every day, and says she often paints until late afternoon.
“I find that the more that I paint every day, the more I feel like my imagination can just run,” she says.
Her contemporary natural scenes play with a mix of realism and the abstract. Each piece features a realistic painting of a wren or bluebird, surrounded by more conceptual and playful elements.
Schultz says she likes “towing that line between something quite realistic and something messy.” There’s usually something playful and whimsical. The goal, she says as a self-proclaimed introvert, is to create artwork that’s peaceful, easy to look at and also “a bit of an escape” from a fast-paced lifestyle.
“Whether you need a moment of escapism or you’re having a bad day, it’s like a little calm moment,” Schultz says.
Her artwork is available locally at Shain Gallery in Myers Park, where it will be featured in August as part of a group show. Schultz’s art is also available in Greenville, S.C., Atlanta, Dallas and in her home state of Mississippi, at locations in Ridgeland and Starkville.