SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS January 19, 2007

"Traditional measures of critical appraisal only barely apply when viewing “Friend & Family Show,” the group show currently in the Harris and Fredda Meisel Gallery of Art in the Rehabilitation Institute of Santa Barbara. In part, the wide diversity of artistic quality and levels of seriousness relate to the very nature of the show’s participants, both amateur and professional, who are all former patients, employees or friends of the institute. Kathleen Elsey is a member of the the New Fauves, and she brings her own fauvist stamp to outdoorsy work. But there’s a range of expressive values entailed in that asserted sense of personalized style. Subtler means prevail in Old Barn, Sedgwick, with its smart composition and softer harmonic color scheme." Josef Woodward, Journalist/Art Critic

”It was a surprisingly hot day in early February when I first went to the Sedgwick Land Preserve to begin this painting. I was immediately attracted to the old barn, the rikkety shack and the pick up truck. I started the painting with the geometric shapes of the land, working through the complexity of the scene. In thhis paintng, nothing is brighter than the whites of the sunlit barn which is th element of the scene that made me want to paint it. I panted on a gessoed canvas panel to which I had added three layers of gesso.This gave the board a pbbly texture–a wonderful rough surface which "grabbed" the paint.”  Kathleen Elsey