“There’s a humility in drawing,” Gustavus Adolphus College associate professor of art and art history Kristen Lowe says. “Charcoal is made from burnt sticks, and it’s something that anyone can buy—and it is capable of producing any human emotion in the right hands.”
Lowe, who teaches drawing courses in the Gustavus Department of Art and Art History, is active as a working artist and documentarian. Her work was highlighted in a 2012 episode of TPT’s MN Original, which is available online and will air again on Monday, February 1, 2021 at 7 p.m. on TPT MN. The segment discusses Lowe’s documentary project, Painting the Place Between.
Painting the Place Between was a two-year project by Lowe that premiered at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Fitzgerald Theatre in 2013 and features the work of four contemporary Minnesota artists: Betsy Byers, Jill Evans, Holly Swift and Andrew Wykes. Byers also serves on the art faculty at Gustavus.
The feature-length documentary focuses on the work of these four Minnesota artists who work with a common thread — the land. Their work includes land and water, virgin prairie and woodland as well as farmland and urban areas around Minnesota. With a desire to connect with the world around them through their work, each artist asks (in uniquely different ways) whether they “shape or are shaped” by the land around them. The documentary aired in its entirety on PBS in 2016.
“The language I’m using in the storyboards and the language I’m using in the film I really do feel is very similar to what I’m using in the drawing,” Lowe explained at the time, “in terms of knowing scale, thinking about rhythm, composition, pathways, curiosity, the way the eye travels through the image.”
Tune in to TPT MN at 7 p.m. on Monday, February 1, 2021, or catch the full episode online.