Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304090258
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
A COUNTRY PAINTER
It's a long way from the Left Bank of the Seine to the left bank of the Little River.When Floyd County painter Kazhia Kolb was a student at the Sorbonne and the Beaux Arts in Paris, it was a 15-minute stroll through the busy streets to the Eiffel Tower.
Now, when she sets up her easel on the front porch of her century-old farmhouse across the Little River from Montgomery County, only the watery babble of the river breaks the country silence. And a 15-minute walk takes her to a ridgetop where the hills and meadows of Floyd County fade into the blue distance.
Kolb says she's felt like the "odd man out" all her life, and that in Floyd "everybody looks at me like I'm the foreigner" because of her English accent. Nevertheless, she says Floyd County is home.
Though she was born in New York City and is an American citizen, the artist was raised by her mother and grandparents near London. She moved to Paris after secondary school to live with her father, taking a degree in lettres modernes (modern literature) at the Sorbonne.
Shortly thereafter Kolb studied art for two years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, sandwiching a year at Notre Dame in between. It was at the American university that she met her husband, Daniel, who teaches philosophy at Radford University.
Kolb, whose rural landscapes can be seen in galleries in Chapel Hill, N.C.; Roanoke; and elsewhere, said her art career got off to an unlikely start.
"What I really wanted to be when I got out of school was a farmer. When I was about 10 we used to go on vacation in Wales, which reminds me a lot of Floyd County, and we just loved spending the whole day helping the farmer. I thought it was the perfect way of living," she said.
"I've always been appreciative of those writers who are lyrical about the land, like Tolstoy. But once I went out with a chicken in my arms to kill it and I couldn't do it, and I realized at that point that I wasn't cut out for it."
Kolb's impressionistic canvases are brilliantly colored celebrations of the Appalachian countryside. The Little River meanders through many of them, glittering in sunlight and flowing darkly under the green shadow of trees. Kolb acknowledges that her interest in landscapes can be traced to her early infatuation with rural living.
"That's why Floyd County is so neat, because it's got these wonderful little family farms. You get the feel of people having lived there for a hundred years. There'll be a little house that's been loved and families have grown up there, and the trees and the fences are a certain way because of what has been done. You get the feel of people just from looking at the landscape," Kolb said.
But her path to mastery wasn't smooth. Kolb says her years at the Beaux Arts were of little use.
"Instead of getting better there, I felt I was getting worse," she said. "There was little or no interest in teaching you the basics of painting and drawing. They really didn't teach you, in fact. There were artists who came in one day a week, but there were 50 people in the room, so they only looked at the very best, and everybody else was left directionless.
"That's fine for a mature student or somebody who's truly gifted, but if you're just coming in it's a different story."
Luckily, she encountered a teacher in America who was good at teaching fundamentals, and she recalled that learning the new techniques was a revelation.
These days she concentrates on honing her ability to see.
"I want to make each image more arresting, each color more exciting," she said.
Art, says Kolb, "is a way of thinking about things. It's hard because it's not a way of thinking with words. Instead, it's contemplative. Words always seem so inadequate."
The artist is reluctant to intellectualize her work, but a few minutes of conversation reveals that she is absorbed by the mystery of light.
"I would see things that I thought were beautiful or lovely, and I would want to make something that was lovely myself. I'd look at a painting with sunlight streaming through the woods, and I'd say, `Yeah, that's what it's like!' It's marvelous, trying to catch the way the light was," she said.
The artist's children, Andrew, Laura and Mary-Margaret, are honor students at Floyd Elementary and Floyd High School. As they have gotten older, their mother has found it easier to venture away from home in search of scenes to paint.
"I go out into the countryside, out into the garden, down to the bridge, usually within two miles. There was a barn I went to last year. I like to go back to a place many times under different weather conditions, because it looks different each time and the one subject can furnish different paintings," she said.
Floyd is a good place to paint, Kolb says. Though frequently her only company is the herons and kingfishers who live near the house, sometimes neighbors will stop to inspect her work. The farmers are happy to see her painting their land, Kolb says.
Though her landscape studies could never be mistaken for abstract canvases, Kolb says she is not a strict realist, either.
"I will look at the colors in front of me and I will try to make a balance of all those colors - I don't think realists do that," she said.
Kolb says her brother visited and, after viewing her brightly colored river scenes, got a glimpse of the real thing.
"But your river is brown!" he exclaimed.
"I couldn't paint a brown river," Kolb said. "I'll put some blues and pinks into it."
She said her work is an effort to catch the "beauty of the created universe. . . . I haven't really worked it out, but beauty is an opening of the soul toward something that is much more exciting and wonderful than yourself."
A monthlong exhibit of Kazhia Kolb's paintings just ended at the Shenandoah Valley Art Center in Waynesboro. Some of her canvases are hanging at the Summerhill Gallery in Chapel Hill, and her work is sometimes available at Gallery III in Roanoke. In July she will have a show at the Christiansburg History Museum.