Kathleen Clement

Artist Biography

Born into an artistic family, Kathleen Clement's father, George Bee Clement, was a Nebraska artist known for his landscape paintings and chalk art performances, and many of the women in her family were quiltmakers—including her grandmother Wilhelmine Ziemke Foth who has a quilt in the International Quilt Museum collection. In 1946 she moved to Wisconsin to attend college but transferred to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 1948 to complete her BA degree and study art under Kady Faulkner and Dwight Kirsch. After graduating, Clement lived in New York, where she met her husband, Richard M. Sibley. The couple moved to Mexico in 1961 where the artist has lived and worked ever since. This painting is from a series that demonstrates some of Clement's first attempts using textile imagery to represent landscapes painted in multiple transparent layers of acrylic paint. She studied the use of transparent acrylic with Maestro Toby Joysmith (1907-1983), an art critic and teacher in Mexico City. This technique merges the landscapes and light from her Nebraska childhood, the quilting in her family, and the playful magical realism of Mexico.