By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
It’s taken more than 20 years for Kat Pahl to reach this point in her artistic career, and it will take two exhibitions to display the results of those creative endeavors.
Today (Thursday Feb. 25) an exhibit of work from the past several years will open at Bowling Green Beer Works, 322 North Grove St. in Bowling Green. A low-key because of COVID opening will be held at 6 p.m. The exhibit will run through late April.
Then, Pahl explained, she will replace the work with her most recent paintings, done in her final year of graduate studies. Those will be shown in this spring’s MFA Exhibition in the Bowling Green State University galleries.
Pahl works in watercolor and acrylics, creating atmospheric abstracts.
She will receive her Master of Fine Arts in painting this spring, more than 20 years after she first arrived on campus to study art.
Pahl said since she was 5, she’s been determined to be an artist.
She has been drawing as long as she can remember. She recalls as a child drawing a picture of a cartoon character and showing it to her aunt, who praised her on its likeness to the model.
“I was little, and when you’re young and into art and somebody says that to you, you think ‘maybe I am really good at that, maybe I should go into that.’”
That encouragement she got from her family kept her at it.
She added, “there was an enjoyment to being in my own space and making something.”
Pahl grew up in the rural area near Carey. It was a small school system, and she had some good art teachers, but when she arrived at BGSU in 1999, having graduated from high school a couple years earlier, she felt “unprepared.”
While other students came with studies in photography, ceramics and sculpture, she had none of that. She was focused with drawing with graphite.
Still she was determined. “I was always the eccentric one that didn’t fit in,” she said. “There was that enjoyment. It just made sense to me. It was a way for me to put my thoughts into something. I just thought I was good at it. It was something I could do. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else than making art.”
The struggles of being in her 20s, living on her own, and having to work full time to support herself, stretched her undergraduate experience out. She graduated in 2007, winning Best of Show in that year’s Undergraduate Exhibition.
Starting a family and settling into the community, put her art work on hold.
For 10 years, she worked as a commercial photographer. She’d done well in her BGSU photo classes, and felt this would be a good creative outlet.
Several years ago, she mentioned to a friend how much she missed painting. The friend suggested trying watercolor. Pahl dismissed it at first. That was something, she’d done when she was a child. But she did meet with the friend so they could work together.
“I ended up falling in love with it,” she said.
At first she concentrated on figures. Early in her undergraduate work she wanted to do portraits and created images of fantasy creatures, fairies and dragons.
But now as she worked in watercolor she became fascinated with the process itself, how the paint moved in the water. She opened up to all the possibilities of the medium. Abstractions grew out of this focus.
These marked the beginning of the body of work that will be shown at Beer Works.
They also provided the portfolio of work Pahl submitted to BGSU when she applied to graduate school. She’d always wanted to go to graduate school with the aim of eventually marketing her work through galleries. It would also give her the credential needed to teach part time if that option came up. “I love teaching.”
She’s “retired” from commercial photography.
The faculty encouraged to stretch beyond her comfort zone by incorporating acrylic paint into her work.
The idea, he said, was “to shake it up a little bit and try different things. You’re only in grad school one time.”
In her university studio, she found herself working on six canvases at once. “I was a messy painter at that point.”
But that had to change when the pandemic closed campus down.
Now in more restricted space at home she returned to watercolor, but now using not just watercolor and acrylic, but ink and gouache.
Those spawned her most recent work.
In her undergraduate days, she didn’t feel connected to Bowling Green in part because so many of those she started school with had graduated by the time she finished.
“I don’t feel that way anymore,” Pahl said. “I feel that Bowling Green has definitely become my home. I feel very passionate about the community here.”
Once she graduates, she hopes to help build more a sense of community among local artists. “It would be great if we could organize something together.”
That Justin Marx, the owner of Beer Works, is using space to exhibit art is a step in that direction.
Marx, who has previously worked representing artists, said he’s wanted to support artists. When he expanded the microbrewery into the building to the west that gave him room. But just weeks before the first show, the space was closed down because of the pandemic. Another planned exhibit in the summer also had to be canceled as case counts ticked up.
He did show snapshots of the business submitted by customers to celebrate the brewery’s fifth anniversary.
Now he’s ready to serve up a taste of art to go along with beer.
