Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 13, 1995                   TAG: 9510130008
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-1   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NEWBERN                                LENGTH: Medium

SHE'S PUTTING HER LIFE INTO HER ART

So far, she says, she has no regrets.

"Everything here is my own doing," she said from the Newbern studio she calls Kathy's Kottage. "I take a lot of pride in it. I'm busier than I ever was."

Sledd, who signs her artwork "Kathy jo," had commuted from her Claytor Lake home to Wolverine Corp. in Blacksburg for 16 years. She worked her way up from production scheduling to customer services. She enjoyed her co-workers. It wasn't enough.

"Life is just too short to spend it doing something that you're not into doing," she said - a fact brought home to her when her parents died at a relatively young age.

"I've always been artistically inclined," she said. "Any spare time I had, I was doodling or painting."

She opened her first box of Crayolas at age 4. Today she favors watercolors and pastels. "It keeps me from getting bored, to do the different mediums and the different subject matters. It keeps me excited."

Sledd likes to work in a series of six or eight paintings with similar themes. Most of her work is realistic, often based on photos she takes.

"Being an artist, I can take a so-so picture and do what I want to make it a good painting," she said.

Sledd, a Wyoming native, got seriously into painting in 1976, two years before she and her first husband divorced and she moved to the New River Valley. She rented a Ryder truck, hitched her 1971 Volvo to it and surprised her parents by her unannounced appearance.

A neighbor of her parents was Jack Sledd, who would become her new husband and support her move from Wolverine to Kathy's Kottage, where she has her studio and markets her work. The studio opened during Newbern's annual Octoberfest last year.

The cottage itself was built in 1898, and had been an office for a doctor and a justice of the peace. It took a lot of work for Sledd to restore it close to its original state.

"It's kind of neat, really, to have my work space and selling space together," she said. Customers seem to like it, too. "They're more interested in what you have for sale if they can see you creating it."

Sledd's work has won awards in art competitions including, most recently, a first place and a best in show award in this summer's Wytheville Chautauqua Festival where she also collected prizes in 1993 and 1994. But Sledd believes an artist can always learn more. She's taken classes with Lyndall Mason, Cecil Neal, Raymond Williams and Barbara Capps.

Capps, a Christiansburg artist, was among those who encouraged Sledd to pursue her art full time.

(She remained one of Sledd's supporters even after finding out that it was Sledd who snagged the personalized "ARTIST" license plate from the DMV. Capps had sought the plate for herself several years earlier.)

To survive, Sledd has had to focus on the print market.

Her first series of 250 limited-edition prints are of a charcoal titled "Fred Goad & Co.," which shows the Newbern resident, who died last spring, at the plow behind his two horses.

"He was a character," Sledd said. "He was a story-teller and he knew an awful lot of people. I had that on the drawing board when I opened here last October when I worked. And it was amazing, the number of people who came through here and said, 'That's Fred Goad?'"

The signed and numbered prints are available at Kathy's Kottage in Newbern, the Fine Arts Center for the New River Valley in Pulaski, Radford Pottery and Maggie's Treasures in Christiansburg.

Kathy's Kottage, located in the middle of Newbern, is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, and by appointment or chance Sunday. She can be reached at 674-5241.