Feature Friday - Kathy Panton

This weeks feature is another amazing, talented artist. Her name is Kathy Panton. Read on to get to know Kathy a little better and as always, click on banner/pics to be taken to her shop/products.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am an artist living in Brisbane, Australia. I currently work part time as a special education teacher, but what I really want to do, and am aiming for, is to be a full time artist. I have two cats. I'm a little bit quirky, I think I'm the stereotypical "artist type". I love chocolate, second hand shops, reading about peoples lives, philosophy, road trips, film, and collecting odd books from the 50s - 80s.

How did you get started in your current craft?

I returned from overseas (London) after doing some courses at St Martins School Of Art. I was really inspired there, and discovered some new techniques. On return, I was searching for some paper that would give me some of the painterly effects I was after. Although I wasn't really sure what I was after. The sales assistant at the art shop said "why not try this" and gave me this paper, which normally would not be used in the way I use it. I use gouache and watercolour on it, and got the effects you see in my work.From that I started doing collages of famous musicians, and over a few years, when I got familiar with the effects I could achieve using the paint, I moved towards the sort of work you see on http://www.kathypanton.etsy.com/I do have another style I use, which are super realistic 2metre X 2metre portraits of faces using graphite pencil. But because of the size, I don't have this work on etsy.

Where do you get inspiration for your artwork?

The inspiration is from colour itself. The process and technique dictates the work. I see things in the patterns and make things based on that. It can be quite a "busy" technique, and it has taken a while to develop a style, and because of the busy-ness of the patterns, I have to be quiet minimalistic, and usually use a white background. Recently, I have started to incorporate some of the vintage papers I have collected- like old music sheets, notebooks with handwriting, and other things.I do get a lot of indirect inspiration from looking at other peoples art, and regularly schedule an afternoon at Borders to absorb all the art magazines. I treat it like a library, and I think everyone else does too! Not my fault they have lounge chairs!

Tell us a little about your workspace.

Its a nest of cut up paper!!! Luckily I have a whole room for it, which consists of my computer, and a really large work table. I also have a cabinet of huge horizontal sliding drawers where I store the large sheets of paper before they are cut up. I really need several of those cabinets. It can get quite crazy in here. I have lots of "filing systems" for cut up bits of paper.I store finished artworks in another room, far away from the chaos in here. The other room is my library, where I have all my books on tall shelves, and store art materials. I also use this room for "Packing and Shipping".

Other than Etsy, where can we find you and/or your products ?

Etsy is my main site however I am on Threadless.com, a t-shirt company. http://www.threadless.com/profile/935453/kathypYou submit a design, and if it gets printed on a t-shirt you get paid! I recently joined, and currently have 1 design up for scoring http://www.threadless.com/submission/207139/Musical_ButterflySome of my earlier work can be seen on http://www.thestylefile.com/show.php?illustrator_id=163 This site is on the Australian Society Of Authors site.

Is there anything else you would like the readers to know?

I have some Pocket mirrors coming soon to my shop, and they should be cute!!

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