On the walls hang both finished and unfinished landscapes rendered in acrylic, some hanging under white sheets to protect them from the sun and dust. The requisite artist's palette lurks nearby. A few teaching guides for Curry's art students remain up, even in the summer, and near the sink and refrigerator sit photographs of her four children and seven grandchildren. Stacks of framed works and canvases are stored in the corner, and a metal chest of drawers contains even more sheets of paper that haven't made it to a wall yet.

"There are probably a thousand pieces of art in this room," Curry says. "When you reach a certain stage as an artist, you accumulate a lot of work. I just started thinking recently about where I'm going to put it all."

But the selling point of this room wasn't something easily captured within the studio walls. When Curry moved to the Bay Area in 1994, she was looking for a studio so she wouldn't have to keep paying to store her artwork. When touring a space in a former cannery building in the Japantown area of San Jose, her decision was made the second she opened the door—and saw the rolling hills of the East Bay gleaming through the windows.

This studio is where Curry spends her days painting, and those hills are what inspire her to create the expressive nature scenes that are her signature pieces. Both undoubtedly helped Curry achieve the honor of being named Cupertino's Distinguished Artist of the Year for 2004. Curry began her career in Washington, D.C., but moved to Cupertino 10 years ago. With her shift in geography came a shift in her subject matter, but what's stayed the same over that time period is the tendency of her art to achieve national—and occasionally international—fame.

"I make my life as an artist, not my living," Curry says. "Making visible the invisible—that's what being an artist is all about."

The religious intonation to that statement is not an accident; Curry was raised as a Catholic and graduated from the Catholic University of America in Washington. But her artistic training began long before that, when she was a youngster following her military father around the country. She ended up in New York City in her teenage years.

"I was in a Catholic school, where there was no art or music," Curry says. "But these were the years of abstract expressionism. My mother taught me to use the subways at the age of 13, so I started going to galleries on my own." Her interest in art began to blossom, and Curry took a few night classes to augment her growing interest. But when it came time for college, she decided instead upon a liberal arts education and studied drama at Fordham University and then finished her degree at Catholic University. "Art schools at that time were very focused and intense," she explains.

After receiving her degree, Curry married and had three of her four children before thinking about going back to school. "When I was 27 or 28, I went back and did all my coursework for my BFA and MFA," she says. "But then, I had my fourth child, and it was taking too long. I didn't want to be in school anymore." So, instead of continuing with school, she got a job at a local nature center, where she began painting murals for exhibits—and learning about the flora and fauna of the area through the center's naturalists.

That exposure helped focus her art onto the Appalachian environment in which she was working. "This scientific info was somehow being filtered through me. I was painting to capture the experience of being in the woods," Curry says. "You have these wonderful moments when you're hiking, and you have to sit on a rock and draw for a half hour." This concentration on painting natural subjects in wild and experimental ways coincided with a change in medium as well. "I worked with oil in school, but I don't like the fumes," she says. Curry instead works with acrylic paints, which can often take on a plastic appearance when dry. "I've done things with acrylics that people say they haven't seen before," she says.

While she was getting plenty of opportunities to paint at her job, Curry didn't really jump out onto her own until the mid-1970s. "I'd worked as a managing editor at a poetry journal, and I'd been a third-grade teacher," she says. "I did want to work part time, and my daughter said that I was much more interesting when I came home from work instead of being at home all day." Leaving her children behind to get her own studio space in Arlington wasn't the hardest part—finding her own creativity with no outside stimuli was.

"That was a very formative experience. There were no kids around, so I had to face the blank page and decide what I was going to paint that day," Curry says. "I began to understand the fear of 'I have nothing to say and no one wants to hear it.'" Reading a lot about the creative process from authors like Flannery O'Connor and John Steinbeck was a help, so Curry finally began to produce a steady stream of work and wrangle it down to a style she could control.

And outside forces began to notice. She began exhibiting in smaller galleries and exhibitions in the mid-Atlantic area around 1977, which was a learning experience. "After my first major show in Washington, there was a review in the Post and I got really scared," Curry says. "I've gotten to enjoy it now." She was able to go full time as an artist in 1983 (her largest works currently price at between $3,500 and $5,500) and began racking up the accolades. Among other honors, Curry won an Alumni Achievement Award from Catholic University, which other alums such as Susan Sarandon and Jon Voight have also won. "I taught him how to sew buttons," Curry says of the Midnight Cowboy star.

Curry's works have appeared in juried exhibitions and collections around the country, including a current installation at the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco and at Foxhall Gallery in Washington. But a fair number of her colorful landscapes have also traveled overseas—as part of Art in Embassies, a program that loans out American artwork, Curry's pieces have been exhibited in embassies in Bolivia and several African nations. She also participated in an art exchange between Washington and Moscow in 1991.

But after a divorce, Curry decided to move to the Bay Area to be closer to her daughter, Maria—Curry's three sons have all made their homes in Europe at various times. She chose to live in Cupertino and just recently purchased a townhouse near the fire station with her partner, Walt. The decision to go to San Jose for studio space was prompted by one of her sons, who was then a swimming coach at San José State University. "I would get studio space in Cupertino if they had it," she says. "I love Cupertino—I like riding my bike around, and I like that it's named after a saint."

The move to California also changed the fundamentals of what Curry was painting. Instead of painting trees covered with tarps to protect them from the winter frost, her scenes changed to beaches and more tropical plants. "It was bound to change—there are new images here," she says. She also finds that more structures like geodesic domes are making it into her paintings—that kind of building isn't very common outside of the western United States.

Her interaction with local artists obviously had to change as well. She had started teaching in Virginia in 1990 and toured herself around to workshops in France and New Mexico, but she currently works with three painters in her studio during the school year. Curry is involved with Christians in Visual Arts, which attracts artists from all over the world to its conventions. She also belongs to the South Bay Area Women's Caucus for Art, which recently held an exhibition at Stanford University in which Curry participated. "You go nuts if you don't talk to other artists," she says.

It was through this interaction that Curry met Constance Guidotti, who was Cupertino's Distinguished Artist of the Year in 2003. Guidotti recommended Curry for this year's award after the two exhibited together. "She's a fantastic artist—her work speaks for itself," Guidotti says. "I was really taken with a large work of hers of the local coast here. It's just so colorful."

Curry says she's delighted by her award, which she received at a performance of Shakespeare in the Park in August. "It's such a nice idea to pay attention to the artists in a community," she says. While Curry has shown her work in far-flung places, she loves that two of her large pieces hang in the Saratoga library, and she's proud to pay her business taxes to Cupertino because she's excited about the new library.

At 68, Curry still makes her daily trip to her studio to work—and often stops at the Foster's Freeze down the road for an ice cream cone on her way home. "I feel 12 in my heart," she says. She keeps busy outside her studio with a membership to Opera San José and studies French in anticipation for the trip she makes to the birthplace of Impressionism every other year. Curry also swims competitively and practices several mornings a week at 6 a.m. "I could not be painting if I didn't keep my stamina up," she says.

But her studio, with all of its amenities, suits her just fine. This is the first studio space she's had to herself as an artist, but besides the solitude and the view, the other major comfort is the running water. "I don't have to run down the hall," she says with a grin.

For more information on Kate Curry's art, visit www.katecurry.com.