Kelly Curl’s paintings begin with attention. They arise from time spent looking—standing still in the field, moving slowly through a landscape, tracing light as it shifts across form. Drawing, photographing, and painting are not separate acts but part of a continuous way of knowing, each mark a response to what the land reveals through patience.

Her work explores landscape as process rather than image. Forms gather and dissolve, colors press forward and recede, and surfaces hold evidence of revision and return. Geology, water, wind, and growth are not depicted literally, but felt through layered paint, gestural marks, and subtle shifts in tone. The paintings carry the memory of natural systems in motion—erosion, bloom, accumulation, weather.

Curl’s practice is shaped by a designer’s way of seeing: studying relationships, testing structure, and allowing intuition to guide resolution. Field sketches and photographs serve as fragments—impressions rather than instructions—that are reworked in the studio through oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, and mixed media. Representation gives way to abstraction and back again, creating space for ambiguity, atmosphere, and discovery.

At the heart of the work is craft and touch—the physical act of making, the resistance of material, the quiet conversation between hand, surface, and time. These paintings invite viewers to slow down, to linger within color and form, and to sense landscape not as fixed scenery, but as a living, breathing presence. In this way, seeing becomes an act of care, and painting a form of stewardship.