Pastel on paper

Size: 15” X 38”

Bio:

Kerry Hirth was born in the Midwest and currently lives and works near Columbia, Missouri. Her work explores the translation of music to visual art.

Kerry's work has been presented in gallery exhibitions nationally and internationally, as well as closer to home, where she is represented by HiIliard Gallery in Kansas City.  In addition to exhibitions and collaborations, Kerry has done numerous private, public, and corporate commissioned artworks.

Kerry's approach to music and visual art has been shaped by her unique academic background. She received a BA in Philosophy with minor in music performance in 1994 from the University of Missouri-Columbia. During that time, she did archaeological illustrations of Mayan artifacts on site in Belize for the University of Texas-Austin and performed french horn at the Aspen Music Festival for two seasons. She received an MA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1998, and subsequently graduated from law school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, working as an attorney in public interest law in Missouri and Illinois. She also received an AAS in Computer Networking from Moberly Area Community College. Her experiences with professional music performance and the study of analytic philosophy contribute significantly to her approach to time and place in her work. 

More about this work:

The title Lonesome Ocean comes from Bob Dylan's Boots of Spanish Leather

No, there's nothin' you can send me, my own true love
There's nothin' I'm wishin' to be ownin'
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
From across that lonesome ocean

According to Greek myth, anemone flowers were created from the blood of Adonis when Venus, his lover, mixes it with nectar as she grieves over his dying body. There are two sources of the text, one a direct quote from the myth of Ovid, the other a work by A.F. Moritz entitled Orpheus.

​The death of Adonis
And yet not everything is in your power she said. Adonis, there shall be an everlasting token of my grief.

Orpheus
By A. F. Moritz
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored...

Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said
to me:
That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces
between clouds,
to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink
from a stream going by.
What I sang is lost in time, you don't know what it was, all you have
is your own
old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that
only signifies
each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible
things.

​Lonesome Ocean takes on the colors of two kinds of anemone - a green waving sea anemone and a bloody-purple anemone flower. The green sea anemone and its red coral substrate surround the blue land anemone in the center of the drawing.