January 18, 2007

Kathy Moulton working on one of the 32 images featuring Yellow Springs locales that she plans to show at the Winds Cafe from mid-January until the end of February.

By Lauren Heaton

In Kathy Verner Moulton’s version of Yellow Springs, hyenas dine at Ha Ha Pizza, porcupines marry in the pine forest, cows moo for peace on the street, and hound dogs nose around the Yellow Springs News. And in her storybook depiction of a place she calls “my town,” all the animals in the kingdom come to the AACW Blues Festival to celebrate the diversity of this small, homey community.

Moulton’s love for Yellow Springs anchors her most recent creation of 32 vividly colored illustrations featuring lifelike animals doing very humanlike things in various locations around the village. The collection, called “My Town: the Muses of a Not So Vocal Local,” will show at the Winds Cafe from Jan. 14 through the end of February. The public is invited to a reception at the Winds on Sunday, Feb. 4, from 5 to 7 p.m.

“My Town” is a whimsical take on an insider’s view of the village Moulton has lived in for 35 years, she said. The idea for the show came from an illustration she did a year ago of birds and penguins flocking to the Little Art Theatre. The print, which hangs in the theater’s box office, was part of a fundraising event for the theater, but creating it brought ideas for illustrating other unique and highly frequented spots in town, Moulton said.

Gracing the Oten Gallery, whose brick arches reminded Moulton of Noah’s Arc, are pairs of giraffes, deer and skunks, with one busy beaver holding a hammer at the helm of a piece called “If He Builds It, They Will Come.” Dalmations, leopards and cheetahs don fire hats and drive the big engines in front of the Miami Township Fire-Rescue station in a piece entitled “On the Spot When You Need Them.” Moulton painted a bunch of kids, the kind with coarse fur and little horns, hoofing around the steps of Mr. Fub’s Party, and it’s none other than bulldogs in blue and white uniforms cavorting in front of Yellow Springs High School in “It’s Been a Hard Day’s School, and I’ve Been Working Like a Dog.”

The scenes set in the village are realistic not just because Moulton drew them from a photo, but also because she used a computer to help her do it. Working in Photoshop, Moulton makes a rough outline of the location from a digital photo and places it on a blank screen, her digital canvas. She uses a digitizer and digitizer pen, a large pad and drawing wand that works like signing an electronic credit card machine, to draw in the details and color the scene. She then draws in the animals and other details, sometimes drawing them on paper first and scanning them in.

Rather than a paint-spattered studio, Moulton’s work space consists of two large flat screen monitors on a drafting table and a professional Epson UltraChrome printer that captures the details and brilliant colors of her art on archival paper. Some people assume that because she works on the computer, her art isn’t real art, she said. But whether she’s using pen and ink or digitizer and pixel, it’s all art to Moulton, whose work now is difficult to differentiate from the work she did before she began using the computer as a tool 10 years ago.

Moulton got her savvy with computers first as an intern with Bing Design, and later as a designer of house plans for local builders. An artist first, beginning with childhood dreams of drawing for Walt Disney, she merged the two fields and gradually learned enough facility to make the programs create the artwork in her unique style.

Her Web site, www.kvooom.com, is now full of greeting cards and children’s books she has written and illustrated, including one called “A View from You,” which she wrote after 9/11 about trying to understand the world from someone else’s perspective.

Yellow Springs’ emphasis on the value of diversity prompted her to create “My Town,” Moulton said.

“I love that this town strives to embrace everyone,” she said. “In my silly, coloring book, children’s-story-loving-mind, I dreamed up this series “My Town,” and I hope that the diversity among my characters represents the diversity we long for, and the colors of my canvas come close to the beauty that I see here.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com