Visiting Artist Kathleen Dunn Jacobs has always used the natural world as inspiration for her painting. She has enjoyed the outdoors since she was a kid, and her truck is like a mobile studio, all the equipment ready to go. She can pull over and find a spot to sketch a scene or paint, maybe even get a little lost in what she is doing. 

Ms. Jacobs is never quite sure what she will find, and that is one thing that keeps her coming back to nature. 

“You start out with certain intentions, but what comes from the work is always different. I find that exciting,” she said on Tuesday, April 7, in a studio in the Richmond Art Center, where she is spending this week painting and talking with students. “In nature, I feel you can't help but make something beautiful, so I like that, but it is the not knowing what will come out of me when I make a painting that is exciting.” 

Ms. Jacobs started out in the business world. Her first undergraduate degree, from Westfield (Mass.) University, was in business management. She said she did not take her art seriously until she was in her 30s, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Massachusetts in 2000 and then a master’s degree at Lesley University in Boston in 2012, both with concentrations in painting. 

“It took a while for me to get going,” Ms. Jacobs said, “but once I decided, that was it. That is why, when I do teach, I tell the kids to follow what they really love.” 

Once she got started with a visual arts career, she took off. She has had various leadership and educational roles in New England, teaches painting and drawing in the United States and Europe, and exhibits through the Northeast.  

Ms. Jacobs said she has a reverence for the landscapes she encounters. “I realize how much nature can teach us about everything,” she said, “and I’m very interested in how and why nature calms us down, what makes a painting calm.” 

She credits her upbringing for much of her artist inclination. Her mother, she said, was artistic, “making rugs, quilts, clothes for the kids, and was a great cook, and there were six of us.” The family went to museums, there were art books in the house, visits in the summer to Wellfleet on Cape Cod, known for its natural beauty. “I think she just let us be,” Ms. Jacobs said of her mom, “let us do what we wanted and provided the time and space and materials to let our imaginations grow.” 

And that imagination keeps growing. Ms. Jacobs recently has been working on frescoes, painting on wet plaster. She also has painted found wood to build small wall sculptures. And, of course, there are always the landscape paintings.  

Her artist's statement reflects her love — and respect — for the natural world. Because of the respect and concern I feel for the natural environment,” she writes, “I want my work to give proper bearing to the subject matter, nature. This is fitting, as nature is eternally relevant to all human beings now and to future generations.” 

Ms. Jacobs’s week in resident on campus is part of the Adolf and Virginia Dehn Visiting Artist program.