Kelly Leahy Radding is a contemporary artist-naturalist living and working in the Connecticut woods. She paints birds, animals, and the natural world — and every subject she paints is one she has encountered firsthand.
That is not a small distinction. In an age when most artists work from stock images and secondhand reference, Radding’s practice begins outside: on walks and hikes, in marshes and meadows, on trails in national parks, and in the quiet woods surrounding her farmhouse studio. The pileated woodpecker calling through her skylight, the badger rounding a bend on a Yellowstone trail, the heron holding perfectly still in the winter reeds — these are the moments that become paintings.
She works in mediums that match the care she takes in the field: egg tempera on true gessoed panel, silverpoint, casein, and dry brush watercolor on calfskin vellum and hot press paper. These are slow mediums, demanding mediums — some of them centuries old. Dry brush watercolor, as Radding practices it, bears little resemblance to the fluid, expressive technique most people picture. It is instead the very careful, patient application of many thin transparent layers, built up gradually in short strokes and stipples — closer to drawing than to painting in the conventional sense. A single painting may take weeks. The luminosity that results, particularly on vellum, where pigment rests on the surface rather than sinking in, cannot be fully conveyed in reproduction. It must be seen.
Radding came to fine art by a circuitous path. A childhood in the Connecticut River valley — surrounded by apple orchards, state forest, and the creatures of the New England woods — gave her the subjects that would animate her life’s work. Graphic design occupied her career for over two decades, until the New York Botanical Garden’s certificate program in Botanical Art and Illustration lit a fire that has burned brighter ever since. Botanical art led back to wildlife, wildlife led back to fine art, and fine art has led her everywhere: to the Society of Animal Artists, where she serves as Vice President of the Board; to Birds in Art at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, one of the most prestigious bird art exhibitions in the world; to the Smithsonian, Kew Gardens, and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; and to the 2026 Oak Spring Garden Foundation Botanical Residency.
She has taught widely — at the New York Botanical Garden, Wellesley College Botanical Gardens, in Florence, Italy, and through The Artful Wild, the Patreon channel she co-hosts with fellow artist Margaret Saylor, where she shares her practice and process with a growing community of artists and nature lovers.
Her hope for the people who live with her work is simple and sincere: that a painting on the wall becomes a daily gift — a moment of centering, of grounding, a quiet return to the natural world.
“I strive to capture the serenity and joy that my nature subjects instill in me — and to pass that on to the people who bring my work home.”
