Katherine Gianaclis was born in Los Angeles in 1924 and died in Las Vegas on March 7, 1999. As a teenager she won first place in a poster contest for The Hollywood Bowl and then went on to study painting at the Art Center in Los Angeles where the famed photographer Ansel Adams was teaching at the time. In the latter 1950s Gianaclis moved to Las Vegas. In the late 1960s and early 1970s she established a reputation as the city's foremost muralist. Whether she painted fat ladies and snake charmers for Circus Circus or Venetian gondola scenes for the MGM, Gianaclis never wanted for work. While Gianaclis painted mostly murals during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the early to mid-1960s (and before) that revealed that Gianaclis had much more power in her palette than even her dynamic mural work could prove.  She married Sol Kantor in 1959 and by 1960 had become a mother. By 1965 she had already given birth to three children. This is the year, when her youngest was only a year old, that Gianaclis produced some of her more provocative works, including Marilyn's Smile, a powerful vision into what Gianaclis conceived was the "lost girl" behind the beauty and radiance of cultural icon Marilyn Monroe. Gianaclis was delving perhaps as deeply as anyone may into the private horrors of the female of her day. Her angst was revealed yet again in the profound stance of the "half-statue/half-maiden" in The Suitor. This work was touched with the same darker hues that Marilyn's Smile had been concerned with, portraying a shadowed beast just seeable behind unfriendly greys and blues. The only true life force is associated with the suitor himself who courts her wearing a laurel of pink flowers. Yet behind him is the ghost of what he may yet become. It is a frightening portrayal of a woman's fear at losing the girl inside. Gianaclis often presents us a vision of the haunted woman in her earlier works. To view a Gianaclis from the 1960s is to discover ghosts and goddesses. Perhaps as much storyteller as painter, Gianaclis takes her viewers to places completely original, completely Gianaclis. One of the most stirring of her works is her depiction of Christopher Columbus. This mural (not commissioned by a hotel) captures the fears and hopes of the man who happened upon our shores so long ago. In the scene, two sea monsters fight as the three ships of Columbus sail on uncertain waters to America. Because of the educational nature of the mural, she donated it to Doris Hancock Elementary School in Las Vegas but it has subsequently been lost. Few artists were so brave in depicting the deeper levels of the feminine soul as Gianaclis. She depicted the witch as well as the maiden. For example, Ring of Fire, which depicts a woman upon a sort of altar as a man leaps through a ring of orange flame. As is customary in her older works, a secondary scene is present. In this case it is that of a primitive man raping a woman. She is often concerned with the struggle to be free of the strictures of 1950s conventionalism upon her sex. Many of her early works are anything but "lady like." She was not afraid to portray the uglier emotions: suppression at the hands of men or sheer abstract personifications of inner, tortured states. These expressions came from a time in our history when women were by no means as free to express themselves as they are today. She never flinched from the true, no matter how frightening or sad, which often made some of her earlier works quite dark and foreboding (and often unsaleable.) Clement Greenberg said, "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first." Gianaclis's early art is at times disturbing, the subject sometimes ugly, but never dull, and always executed with a master's touch. But such exposure of psyche to an artist can have wearying effects. Gianaclis gave up painting altogether in the 1970s after two crucial events: her father's death and a conversion to Christianity. She claimed that she was being led by God to give up her paints. She obeyed. She opened a Christian bookstore shortly thereafter, serving the East Las Vegas community for more than 20 years. Her paints were placed aside until 1996. When she picked up her brushes again her pallete was much brighter, the colors much more varied. These first works of her new era were highly abstract, at times even cartoonish, due to her choice of subject matter: psychedelic birds, half-man/half-beasts-smiling, large surreal fish. She did not immediately embrace any particular subject matter, yet her arrival as a bright, contrasting colorist was undeniable. But then she re-discovered her love of painting the female aura. The angst-ridden females of the past had apparently all been exorcised by 1996. The women of the 1990s flared like orange/red waves on a raging sun. While she soon began depicting women in a life-like form, none of the women ever reached a place of pure realism. She had already done that. Upon re-joining the art world, Gianaclis had instinctively reached for vivid color and abstract form. She sought a fine integration of a variety of colors with abstract curves, bends, circles, angels, diamonds and stars. Whereas before she strove for brutal honesty in portraying the darker realms of woman, here she strove for the opposite. Gianaclis' newest women were much more ethereal, colors beaming forth and curving and blending together before twisting suddenly into otherness, all to the effect of creating a rainbow pronouncement that woman is beautiful and strong and worthy. These new Goddesses contained power undeniable. Over a three year period she painted more than 50 of these modern beauties.   Her wild colors and forms approach the style commonly known as Fauvism made famous by Matisse. Fauvism is an attempt to reduce the art of painting to color and a few other fundamental elements, chiefly line and rhythm. Her newest works are also very much in the style of Robert Delauney's Orphism, possessing an almost musical fluidity in the colors and lines. Gianaclis herself, however, refused to align herself to any particular style, although she was recorded as saying on her deathbed that Picasso had been the most important influence on her art. She was also unable to part with any of her newer works, having at one point sold a portrait of famed rocker Mick Jagger and then, in tears, begging the purchaser to sell it back, proclaiming "It is a part of me." Perhaps one of the most interesting of her modern works is the portrait she painted of Princess Diana , immediately following the Princess' death. It consists of a Diana so solemn that one wonders whether her eyes are open or closed, whether she is awake or in a deep, meditative state, perhaps even whether she is alive or arrived at the other side of life. In fact, the eyes actually seem to open and close when you vary your distance of inspection. During this last period of creativity, Gianaclis was valiantly battling breast cancer through holistic methods. She died of cancer on March 7, 1999 at the age of 73, after painting over 200 paintings over her lifetime, many of which (the earlier works) are lost to her family, as well as numerous murals.  Her paintings have been acquired by the likes of actress Shirley Maclaine, Broadway star Robert Goulet, entertainer Keely Smith, and the multi-millionaire Kirk Kerkorian. The only mural still exhibited is at the Sahara hotel/casino. Gianaclis was shown twice at the Las Vegas Art Museum after her death. Dr. James Mann, then curator of the LVAM, commented that his discovery of Katherine Gianaclis was one of the highlights of his career. He said that her use of disparate images in the early works, while masterfully crafted, were also 20 years ahead of their time. Gianaclis' use of disparate and sometimes borrowed images became prominent in the 1980s, stated Mann, twenty years after Gianaclis painted them. Few artists were painting in such a way in the 1960s. Among those that he compares Gianaclis to are Larry Rivers, Julian Schnabel and Francis Picabia. According to Mann, the canvases are all the more interesting for being produced in a town far away from New York City where most of the great American artists of the day resided. "She is an artist of the highest order," Mann proclaimed Read more regarding Katherine Gianaclis Processes and History