Stephanie Molstre-Kotz tries to create skies that are like something out of a Gothic novel. She uses pastels to create giant purple bruised clouds, flashes of lightning, and to suggest of whipping winds in dark and stormy scenes.
In many of her pieces, as in Asian landscape paintings, humans are dwarfed by the dramatic skies and ethereal scenes. In some, tiny, shadowy figures hold strings that loop up into the sky attached to something unseen. In others, antique flying machines battle the elements.
"Sometimes the sky is the only celestial part of the suburbs," said the Rosemount artist. "All you have to do is tilt your head up. The sky informs you that you are part of nature. In the end, if I just look outside, it tells me everything I need to do to put into my work."
Molstre-Kotz's work is now on display at the Robert Trail Library in Rosemount through Oct. 31.
Her work — a combination of pastels, painting, and mixed media — often merges abstract backgrounds with more representational depictions of animals and humans. She draws inspiration from sources as varied as the atmospheric work of British Romantic landscape painter J.M.W. Turner and the "guttural" abstract calligraphic pieces of American artist Cy Twombly. Molstre-Kotz appreciates Twombly's palimpsest quality, where the original writing has been erased but traces remain and become part of the art.
"I erase about 50 percent of what I make," she said, pointing to the eraser shavings on her studio floor.
Before she occupied her airy studio in the Casket Arts Building in Minneapolis, she spent many years working in her basement studio at home, often drawing the most readily available models — her kids — and many of the pieces in the Rosemount show feature children. "I really enjoy drawing children because they're funny," she said. "My kids really inform my work."
Now her kids make her sit for them, as both became artists, and, as she did, went on to attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
