Kathy Hughes is a New Orleans native who has lived most of her life in the uptown area of the city. As a child her family had a home on the Mississippi gulf coast where she spent summers and weekends throughout her teenage years. Her time spent in the city and on the coast has influenced her art since her days as a Tulane University student earning her degree in Ceramics. As an undergraduate student her work incorporated shapes and the repetition of those shapes and lines that were in her environment, such as the pilings left behind when a pier is blown away by a hurricane. These simple shapes and their organized chaos is a recurring element in her work today. After graduating from Tulane, she received a M.Ed. in Art Education and recently retired from the Jefferson Parish Public School system as an art talent educator for 26 years. After taking an Encaustic workshop 17 years ago she fell in love with this medium and it became her primary means of expression. She does not consider herself a painter in the traditional sense but rather a mixed-media artist as she incorporates ink, oil paint, collage and sometimes other non-traditional materials including the occasional found objects. Her pieces usually begin with mark making, using a variety of dry and wet media. These marks are often covered up but are a starting point for her abstract paintings. Her intuitive process lends itself well to the layering and scraping of the encaustic medium, revealing the marks and colors underneath. To quote the artist Cindy Sherman, Kathy says, “If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it.”