Chasing Her Dreams

Katherine Irish has chased—and caught—two dreams. The first one came to her when she was a young girl. She had pulled out the “P” volume of the family’s set of encyclopedias and flipped through its pages until she landed on “painting.” The masterpieces featured within those pages fascinated her. “I studied those paintings for hours,” she says. A dream was born.

The second dream came to Irish many years later while she was studying art and living in New York. In 1981, she took a painting trip to New Mexico and was fascinated by what she saw there—the landscape and the skies. She dreamed of living and painting there, a dream that was so strong that she soon packed up and moved to Taos.

“I did a lot of faces and figures when I was in New York, but in Taos I was looking at the skies,” she says. “It’s just something I feel in my soul. There’s such a sense of awe. I love clouds because they have so much rhythm and movement and change so quickly—the layers and colors. I can feel the power of nature.”

Read the full article in the September/October 2026 issue.