Rebecca Korth | On Wings of Beauty

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the July 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

FOR TWO YEARS or so, Rebecca Korth and her mother had an almost-daily routine. They would sit together by the large window in the bedroom where Korth’s mother was frequently confined because of a rare and debilitating lung disease. Outside, the artist’s father had created a magnificent garden: flowers of every kind in a wild profusion of colors and shapes, blossoming apple and pear trees, vines of mini kiwis, and three small ponds with miniature waterfalls. At night, solar lights and strings of twinkling Christmas lights illuminated the garden.

Best of all for Korth and her mother, close to the window was a long row of bird feeders on poles. Cardinals, sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, chickadees, and other birds—and the occasional squirrel—were busy at the feeders, which were perfectly set at window height. “The birds made us smile and laugh. Watching them together produced so much levity during a dark time,” Korth remembers. As she and her mother gazed out the window, they talked, deepening their relationship. Aside from her mother’s illness, it was a difficult period for Korth, then in her late 20s and healing from a heartbreak. Her mother’s counsel was as comforting as their joy in sharing the garden’s animated bird life and beauty.

After her mother died, Korth found herself compelled to add a bird into every still-life painting she did. For a number of years, when asked about the feathered creatures incongruously but sweetly perched amid vases, flowers, and fruit, she simply said she likes birds. She couldn’t trust herself to talk about her mother without crying. Now, more than 10 years later, she speaks freely of gratitude for her father’s garden and for the precious days spent at her mother’s side. Her luminous, award-winning paintings speak for themselves.

KORTH GREW up in central Wisconsin in the small city of Marshfield, where she lives today. As a child, her schoolteacher mother encouraged her love of drawing, as did her father, who serves as executive director of a community health center serving low-income populations in northern Wisconsin. “They were really great people to look up to,” Korth says. Her own approach to living was right-brained and highly creative, and she remembers as a child hearing comments about her artistic gifts. At the time she wasn’t sure what others were seeing, but as a people-pleaser she saw that her drawings brought smiles. Another way she found to inspire joy was by making people laugh. In elementary school, a teacher told the kids to draw a self-portrait as they envisioned themselves in the future. Rebecca drew a stand-up comedian, on stage with a microphone and an applause sign. “But I have stage fright,” she says, smiling, “so that wouldn’t have worked.”

Art, on the other hand, required no public stage. When Korth was 13, her parents agreed to send her to Portland, OR, to spend a week with her aunt, landscape painter Sandee Burman. Her aunt generously offered tips on conceiving and composing an image and applying paint. She gifted her niece with a set of acrylic paints, since Rebecca’s mother didn’t want her using oils with toxic solvents. “It definitely lit something inside me,” Korth says of the time spent with her aunt. “I thought: This is insanely cool! If there was any possibility I could do this, it’s what I’d want to do.”

Back home, she signed up for every art class she could at her high school. Yet while painting was fun, she wasn’t yet able to envision it as a career. She enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied a wide range of subjects and earned a degree in psychology while painting on her own. Following graduation and ready to leave Wisconsin, she traveled to Sacramento, where she’d arranged for a job interview. She doesn’t remember now what the business was, but midway through the interview, she knew she needed to leave. Life in an office cubicle was not for her. Interrupting her interviewer, she said simply, “This is not what I want to do. I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time.” The next day she called her aunt in Portland and asked to study with her for an extended time.

Korth lived with Burman for a little over a year, continuing to refine her painting skills—this time in oils—while being introduced to the work of acclaimed painters; she remembers being inspired in particular by noted New Mexico artist David Leffel. She also picked up tips about the business of art. At the same time, her aunt, who achieved professional success after beginning to paint in her 40s, imparted wisdom that was more universal. Korth recalls, “One of the biggest things that stuck with me was: Never stop learning, no matter how much you think you know. Always push yourself to the next level. If it’s not going your way, try a different path.”

Korth’s painting style at the time was realistic, yet within that approach she explored many subjects and genres—landscape, still life, and portraits, both of people and pets. Increasingly she found herself attracted to still lifes, especially for the joy of challenging herself to render fine detail. Inspired by flowers from her father’s garden, she began incorporating objects that caught her eye, “anything shiny and pretty,” she says. Among her favorite things to paint, both then and now, are vases made of richly colored glass or blue-and-white porcelain, inherited from her grandmother or discovered in antique shops. When her mother’s health critically declined, Korth moved back to Wisconsin to be with her. Soon after her mother’s death, songbirds, which she had previously painted occasionally, began continuously appearing in her art.

THESE DAYS, Korth is busy amid the “organized chaos” of her second-floor studio. While her two dogs—an Ibizan Hound named Chaos and a Pharaoh Hound named Cairo—wait to go for their daily run, the 39-year-old painter surveys the shelves full of objects she’s collected. For CARDINAL, CANTALOUPE & BERRIES, she chose a blue glass vase to hold yellow double tulips. The flowers were an aunt’s congratulatory gift when Korth was accepted into the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum’s prestigious Birds in Art exhibition. The cardinal is the favorite bird of one of her grandmothers, now 95 and “a spitfire, with her own iPhone, iPad, and Facebook and Instagram accounts,” the artist says. Enhancing these colors are plump red strawberries in a blue-and-white bowl from Korth’s other grandmother, along with golden-yellow slices of cantaloupe. The painting celebrates “the wonderful women in my life,” she says.

For Korth, radiant color is intended as a smile-producing gift for anyone who sees her art. “I never wanted to paint anything sad or dark,” she says. Her love of happy colors also extends to the home she shares with her husband Tyler and their two hounds: the remodeled kitchen features bright turquoise barstools and a cherry-red sink. The remodel was done at a point in her life, shortly after the death of her beloved first Pharaoh Hound, when Korth needed the consolation of beauty. After a new quartz kitchen countertop was installed, she was dazzled by the exquisite color reflections of whatever was placed on it. So she found a large, shiny porcelain tile and set it up in her studio to reproduce the effect. Today she composes most of her still-life arrangements atop this mirrorlike surface, creating delicate echoes of color and form.

Along with flowers, another source of color in Korth’s father’s garden is his assortment of hot peppers. He cultivates more than 80 varieties, “which is not that easy in central Wisconsin,” the artist says, laughing. “From late August to early fall, there’s any color and size of peppers I’d want to paint.” She eats them, too, describing hers as “a family that loves heat.” For the painting HUMMINGBIRD AND HOT PEPPERS, she filled a large crystal bowl with peppers and added a hummingbird to the scene. The one criterion she gave herself in choosing the peppers was that every color of the fiery fruit is also seen in the hummingbird’s iridescent hues.

Korth always paints from life, using her own photographs for reference if needed, since fruit and flowers quickly age beyond their prime. Although the bird in each painting is based on a reference photo, she carefully considers such elements as light, shadow, and color to create a sense of the creature having just landed in the scene. If a bird with white breast feathers is perched on an orange, for example, she meticulously paints the feathers with a soft but realistic reflective tint of orange.

In seeking out still-life subjects, Korth says, “I paint things I find beautiful or that have meaning to me.” Years after her mother’s passing, the birds that flutter into her imagery infuse it with qualities of both. “My mother was an extraordinary human being, so strong, and she went through so much,” she says. “She was my biggest fan; we were best friends. My painting is my way of honoring her and keeping her memory alive.”

representationHueys Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Edgewood Orchard Galleries, Fish Creek, WI; Milward Farrell Fine Art, Madison, WI; Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; www.rebeccakorth.com.

This story was featured in the July 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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