We were lucky to catch up with Kristen Reitz-green recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kristen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I have lived a life in the arts but not the path I thought it would take. I spent my early life in pursuit of a career in classical music as a french horn player. I’m a graduate of the Hartt School of music and the Juilliard School and spent years traveling the country performing with broadway show tours before settling into Seattle and becoming a member of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra. I also taught horn at several universities. It wasn’t until I had a major health scare and a move to Vashon Island that I began to consider visual arts. I had two small children and needed to make changes to accommodate that, so I took a year off of my performing engagements and took my first art class at the age of 40. My teacher was fantastic and I was a blank slate having never tried painting before. I fell in love right away and luckily my teacher, Pam Ingalls, lived nearby and agreed to mentor me for a bit. I dove in deep and took the work ethic of “practice everyday” from my classical music experience into the art world. I did a painting everyday for years in the effort of getting better. Eventually I started painting large paintings of food, animals, and glass and found my calling. I’ve painted lots of subject matter over the years and that part keeps evolving.
Kristen, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I think one of my personal favorite parts of being an artist is to bring incredible color into the world and into spaces. I live in the Pacific Northwest and we can have a lot of grey days. My art feels joyful of full of vibrant colors that can brighten any space. My most recent work centers around paintings of glass bottles and canning jars. I am endlessly surprised at how many people have a connection to these. So many of us have fond memories of our families canning food or making jam and the jars themselves bring back have a certain kind of nostalgia for many of my clients. While the subjects I paint might be realistic objects, my delight in painting them is actually the abstraction that glass creates as you look through it. It makes for incredible detail that I like to bring to large scale pieces.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I double majored in college in music and engineering but quickly let the engineering go. Somehow at that point, I think I realized the art and music were transformative for the audience and that became the focus of my life. While I have considered easier paths to make a living at points, I have always been pulled back into the feeling that what I can create is unique and brings beauty into the world when so much swirling around us feels confusing and often menacing. Go to a concert, see a museum show and your life can be transformed for that time and hopefully longer.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me personally, the most rewarding piece of creative work is connecting with other people. I spent years performing in the back of an orchestra and having little contact with the audience. As a visual artist now, I get a lot more feedback directly from people that appreciate what I do. Often it is not in ways I intended. I recently created a piece with a close up rendering of letting on a mason jar that says “Perfect Mason”. I loved how light came through the letters and how flowers looked behind that. The funny part is that so many people who have loved this piece have a child named Mason, or their last name is Mason. It’s a joy to see how others connect to my work in ways I could not have imagined!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Kristenreitzgreen.com
- Instagram: @reitzgreenarts
Image Credits
Images by the artist, Kristen Reitz-Green