About:

Marybeth (Kong) Kou has loved to draw for as long as she can remember. Her childhood interest in art was encouraged by seeing her drawings occasionally published in the children's magazine, Nature Friend. She spent hours sitting on her bed copying drawings from favorite illustrated books such as Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Rien Poortvliet's Noah's Ark.

The foundation of her art education was a rigorous four-year drawing and painting curriculum at the Carlin Academy of Fine Art, a classical realist painting atelier in Kennett Square, PA (2010-2014). Through Neilson Carlin, Marybeth traces her instructional lineage directly to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of 19th century France and to the Renaissance masters. In addition, Marybeth has studied at Studio Incamminati with various instructors including Rebecca Tait. In 2014 she was one of 9 international artists to win a scholarship to study at the Florence Academy of Art for a summer session in figure painting with Maureen Hyde and Vitaliy Shtanko. Marybeth sought a liberal arts education at Covenant College on Lookout Mountain, GA, receiving a BA with honors in Philosophy and Religion in 2018. She currently lives, paints, and teaches in Chicago, IL.

Apart from drawing and painting, Marybeth also has passionate interests in classical music, literature, theology, and plants.

Artist Statement:

My aim as an artist is partially captured by a paragraph from C. S. Lewis's A Review of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings:

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.” The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as a story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book [Lord of the Rings] applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.”

Making art is part of how I enjoy, explore, and make sense of the world around me and hopefully help others to do the same. I hope to engage with the anguish, the longing, and the joy of human existence, to point to truth, beauty, and goodness in ways that lead viewers to wonder, to see from new perspectives, to “rediscover reality” – whether it be through a small scene of everyday life, a landscape, or a portrait or figurative piece.

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.