Photo by Mike Fuller

About the Artist

A native of Sacramento, Kay Harden earned her degree in Art from UC Davis where she studied with Wayne Thiebaud, William Wiley and Robert Arneson. Harden has been a Humboldt County resident for 18-years and is well-known for her work depicting our area’s redwood forests and rugged shorelines.

Harden’s distinctive style, perfected after many years as a working artist, is a layering of hundreds of thousands of tiny pen strokes, producing a rich blend of textures. This one-of-a-kind effect is created with rapidograph pens and a full palette of acrylic inks

Often inspired by her travels and the out-of-doors, Harden’s work intricately details the magnificence of nature that surrounds us. Using photographs as the basis for her studio work, Harden is never without her camera and often captures elusive, one-of-a-kind scenes that inevitably change over time.

“Doing this work over the years has taught me that on any subsequent visit to particular place, something will be different,” Harden explains. “For instance, ‘The Council Tree’—one of my personal favorites—was a fully intact, ancient madrone when I first photographed it. A year later, one of its oldest limbs had broken off; the next year the tree blew over in a wind storm and its life was gone but the foliage remained; what you see now is the essence of the wood that made up the tree. I feel honored to have drawn this natural transformation and recorded its place in history.”

With her work in demand from local and international collectors, Harden exhibits regularly in Humboldt County and you can often find her work at the Morris Graves Museum, Piante Gallery and the Law Offices of Barnum & Herman in Eureka, as well as the Scotia Medical Center.

Kay is a member of the Redwood Art Association and the Humboldt Arts Council.
She is also a member of the Ferndale Arts Gallery which is located at 580 Main Street, Ferndale, California--the gallery is open 7 days, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Contact Kay Harden: (707) 599-8252 or Email