Dawn Koetting’s Art Captures Light and Shadows

October 1, 2024

John R. Kemp,

Song of Flora No. 3

The curvature of a horse’s neck, warm light raking across rusted tire rims, a surgically pruned bonsai tree and the evening glow in a South Louisiana landscape. To most people, these might seem completely unrelated. But to Thibodaux artist and retired veterinarian Dawn Koetting, they all share a common thread — beauty and visual grace.

Since retiring five years ago from her veterinary practice in Thibodaux, Koetting has been able to further her lifelong passion for creating art, one that began as a child and followed her through college and professional life.

Whether she is painting a wooded landscape along some back road, volunteering at the local animal shelter or tending her award-winning bonsai trees, Koetting continues to explore parallel worlds, worlds that began in Houston where Dawn was born in 1958. Her father Scott Gregory was in the oil business, and when she was a year old, the family moved to Lafayette where she grew up. Dawn’s family roots run deep in South Louisiana’s Acadian parishes. Her mother Ruby was a Trahan from Crowley and her grandparents Edmond and Elina Boudreaux Trahan lived in New Iberia. She visited them often. Summing it up, she says, “that whole area is home.”

When the time came to go to college, the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, was the natural choice. There she met her husband-to-be, Donald Koetting, and majored in pre-veterinary medicine, even though she had enjoyed painting and drawing as far back as she could remember. Well settled into her pre-vet courses, Koetting sidestepped to take a basic drawing class with the renowned Louisiana artist Elemore Morgan Jr., who later became a life-long friend. Apparently, her drawing skills impressed him.

Abstraction Lily Lotus Series

“When I went to the university,” she says, “I always wanted to know if I could draw with the drawers. Unbeknownst to me, I had no idea who Morgan was and I signed up for his Drawing 101 class. He kept asking me what was my major. I said pre-veterinary medicine. After about a week, he asked me again why was I studying pre-veterinary medicine. I said I was meant to be a veterinarian but the art never left.”

Koetting later received her veterinary medicine degree at LSU but, as she says, art never left her. Years later, Morgan entered her life again. During an exhibition of his work in New Orleans, he urged her to pursue her art. As Koetting’s veterinary practice grew, she hired more assistants, which freed her to enroll in artist workshops around the country taught by hall of fame pastel artists such as Louisiana’s acclaimed artist Alan Flattmann. She also joined the prestigious Degas Pastel Society as well as the Pastel Society of America and the International Association of Pastel Societies, or IAPS. In recent years, her pastel paintings have appeared in numerous juried shows, including, among others, at The National Arts Club in New York, the famed IAPS shows in Albuquerque, and the popular local Shadows- on-the-Teche Plein Air Festival in New Iberia. She continues to build her standing among pastel artists nationwide, especially in the IAPS.

“I fell in love with pastels because it’s kind of a drawing but you can paint with it as well,” she says. “I just loved getting my hands dirty with it.”

Like her hall of fame artist mentors and the French Impressionists painters she admires, Koetting prefers to paint landscapes outdoors on location, or en plein air as it is known in the art world. She loves the way the Impressionists capture sunlight and shadows. Only by painting on location, she says, does one truly see the nuances of color and light in the landscape.

Art 09

“There’s just something about it,” she says. “Some people use the camera but the camera lies. The darks are too dark, the contrasts are too contrasted, the colors aren’t accurate. Photographs are great for capturing detail, but our eyes are much better at seeing. When the camera shows a very dark shadow, our eyes see much more. I love painting en plein air as a tool for making my studio work better.”

Whether painting on location or in her studio, Koetting, like generations of artists, says her “real love” is the warm, humid South Louisiana landscape.

“I am enamored,” she says, “with patterns and light and shadows that I see in the rows of sugarcane or in a landscape with tall cypress trees and their reflections in the water. I’m especially drawn to those areas in the winter because of the yellows, the dead grasses in the swamps, the gray cypress trees. I like the contrasts of yellow and blue skies.”

Those “patterns and light and shadows” in her paintings of wintery cypress swamps, sugarcane fields or a moody, night cityscape draw viewers deep into the image and into their own memories of traveling through South Louisiana’s Acadian parishes. They are impressions of the moment.

As she says, “I enjoy capturing what, to me, is the reason we live here.”