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Oil portraits of emerging adults are seldom painted in our culture, which relies instead on the more immediate results of photography and video. Yet the moments in which young adults develop their ideas, fully realize their selves, and claim their voices beg for the sustained examination that detailed oil paintings demand. Passing Through: Portraits of Emerging Adults honors this transition with life-sized oil portraits and oral portraits of seventeen emerging adults.

Kate Gridley is known for her insights into human character, the quality of light in her work, and her painting technique. She maintains a studio in Middlebury, Vermont, where she has lived and painted full time since 1991. Awarded a Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship from Williams College in 1978, she pursued her studies in New York City before moving to Florence, Italy for a year and a half of study of Renaissance painting techniques in the Atelier of Ben Long, former student of Pietro Annigoni. After a short stint in Boston Massachusetts on her return, she began exhibiting regularly in New York City and throughout New England.

Her portraits hang in public and private collections; her landscape and still life paintings hang in private collections here and abroad. She recently completed the official state portrait of Governor Jim Douglas of Vermont, which hangs in the Vermont Statehouse, and the official portrait of the Honorable William K. Sessions III, which hangs in the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, Washington D.C.

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