3/26 Plein Air in Plain Sight – The Legacy of Santa Cruz Nature Painting 

About the Instructors

Kathleen Aston, Collections Manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History

As Collections Manager, Kathleen Aston is responsible for the physical and intellectual organization and preservation of the Museum’s collections. She joined the museum’s staff as collections specialist in 2017, and holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Reed College and a Master’s of Library and Information Science from the University of Washington. Kathleen is fascinated by the informational life of collections and how they anchor people to an understanding of the natural world. Her other interests include coffee, stargazing, weird plants, animals that look like blobs, and the repair and reuse sections of the waste management cycle.

Read more about Kathleen.

Taylor Seamount, local artist/activist/instructor 

Growing up in the natural beauty of Santa Cruz, CA, Taylor was set on a winding path between science and art. She received her bachelors in biochemistry at UC Davis and later spent two years at the Mark Kang-O’Higgins Modern Painting Atelier in Seattle. After the atelier, Taylor moved back home to Santa Cruz due to a worsening of her invisible disability, POTS. Adapting to her new limitations, Taylor’s artistic practice refocused from large imaginative realist oil paintings to small works in gouache. She came to aspire to the visionary landscape styles of gouache illustrators, James Gurney (Dinotopia) and Kazuo Oga (Studio Ghibli), and accordingly began to study natural color and light through plein air (i.e. painting landscapes on location outdoors). As plein air became central to her creative practice, she developed a distinctive crisp flat-brush style. Additionally, she began a successful business designing and selling her own unique ultra-light-weight plein air sketch easels, fabricated here in Santa Cruz. As a UC Certified California Naturalist and climate justice artivist, Taylor uses plein air and solar punk illustration to envision a regenerative future for her community. In this work, she often collaborates with local activists and environmental stewards. Hobbies not yet incorporated into her work are napping and saying hi to the native plants that are walking distance from her house. Her pronouns are both they/them and she/her.