[guitar playing] I got taught that you respect all animals.

You know, they all have souls and personalities, and many of them have opinions.

And, you know, you're supposed to respect that.

I'm making a decision about how much to put in the frame and what gets in.

What gets out.

If I want long shadows from the sun coming through the trees, or if I want a sunrise or sunset, what ends up in that image is is what I'm feeling when I'm there.

[guitar playing] So how did you two people meet?

It resulted from an art show that you had been at, and then I was there after you a month later, and the person who ran the art show says, you really need to meet this artist.

And your book was there.

And so I looked at what she did, and I realized she's really talented.

She's really a good artist.

And since I do these Heart of Louisiana features, I thought she'd make for a very interesting story.

And boy did she.

So you got the phone call.

Dave McNamara.

Well, he goes, hi, this is Dave McNamara.

I, I'm a news reporter for Fox eight.

And I'm like, yeah, I know who you are.

I got that.

I know your voice.

Katherine Klimitas has been painting since she was a child.

Now in her mid 30s, that childhood hobby is her business, along with being a graphic designer.

And she loves to paint animals.

We've had some really beautiful animals and some really beautiful wildlife, especially birds.

He made me look much better than I felt that day, because I had just been getting over a cold, which turned into pneumonia and I was still coughing.

And actually, we postponed it a couple of days because I had some broken ribs.

I've never had somebody, after I set up a story, call me and say, hey, can we push us back a few days?

I just broke some bones and I was like, this is not going to work right now.

So you're both artists.

Certainly, Dave, with his beautiful photography, you with your incredible watercolor.

You saw, who saw it first?

We ought to be doing something?

I saw it first.

So I had had this idea rolling around about working with a photographer for a long time.

Because, you know, when you're an artist, it's hard to get reference photos legally.

You know, because if you don't change the photo enough, there are copyright issues there.

So he does the story on me.

Naturally, I start following him on Facebook and he posts this spoonbill picture one day and I just commented on it and said, oh, this is really nice.

Can I use it?

He said, oh yeah, sure.

You know, use whatever you see.

You're welcome to whatever.

Then I started thinking more about it and I was like, I wonder if he would be interested in pairing up and doing a collaborative show.

And a sucker is born every minute.

Yeah, he was really into it.

And this started as one show.

Like, this was just supposed to be a one time thing.

And we're up to five now.

It's a it's a few.

It's become almost, almost a full time job.

Yeah, it's a full year.

But you're inspiring each other.

I was not going out and pursuing a lot of wildlife and birds.

He may see it more as torturing, but I call it inspiring.

Yeah.

We can we can mesh those two together.

A dual vision.

Yeah.

Right, right.

So you're in the pirogue.

It's cold.

You're trying your best to get a shot.

The bird flies away.

You don't get it and your cursing her because she is inspiring you.

There are a few utterances.

Yes.

Are they directed at her?

No.

Maybe when he did the crabs that might have been directed at me.

She wanted to paint crabs.

And so I went crabbing.

And I didn't want to, you know, damage any crabs in the making of a photograph.

No crabs were harmed, but we had to pose the crab without it jumping back in the water.

And my wife was holding tongs to get it in place.

And then we'd move and I'd start snapping a few pictures.

And it was.

It was a workout.

It is one of the best paintings in the show, though.

And the fun thing for me has been, I would never look with that much intensity at the face of a crab, but through taking a photograph and then processing that image and bringing up the shadows, it's like, well, these are some pretty complicated looking dudes.

You know, it's a yes, I know.

And they they have a very intense look on their faces.

And they they have a very intense look on their faces.

But what's beautiful is you're taking the photograph, you're looking at it and saying, wow, but she's bringing it to another life that you may notice something that you hadn't that she did.

Oh, absolutely.

I don't necessarily see a personality when I snap a picture, or even when I look at the picture, I see detail, I see feathers, I see hairs on a butterfly that I didn't know were there.

And Katherine spots every single speck on these little critters.

I have five dogs right now.

Our highest has been six.

Our lowest has been three.

And you always had that attraction to animals.

Oh, yeah.

So I grew up with two parents who were veterinarians.

I've never not had a pet.

I used to go to work with my parents on the weekends.

It was kind of just normal for me to be around animals all the time.

I grew in appreciation for them early.

Tell me about your disease.

So I have a disease called osteogenesis imperfecta.

I have type three.

There's a lot of different severities of this disease.

Mine is one of the most severe.

It goes basically from me, or a little worse than me, to somebody who looks pretty normal and who can walk and has very few fractures.

The main symptom of this disease is that you break bones easily.

And you've broken many.

Many, 500 by the time I was ten.

So yeah, we stopped counting at about that point.

That is the main symptom.

It's a disease caused by a collagen mutation, which basically collagen is the stuff that makes up your whole body.

So it's found in bones and ligaments and muscles and skin and hair, nails.

And if there's something wrong with it, that causes a lot of problems.

So my collagen does not absorb calcium.

So that that causes a lot of issues because it makes things like bones and ligaments and muscles weak because it can't absorb the calcium.

I'm not the first to say it, but it hasn't stopped you from doing a tremendous amount of things in your life.

It stops me occasionally, but not often.

Let's talk about you as an artist evolving.

Early on, What got you interested in art?

I couldn't always do everything that my brothers could do.

I couldn't, you know, go play soccer, or softball or, you know, go on roller coasters or whatever.

And so my mom was always trying to find things that would keep me busy that I could do because I was really smart and I was really bored and I was driving her nuts.

One of the things she gave me was one of those cheap little watercolors.

That's.

Yeah, I went through that in a week.

She realized that I really liked art.

And so we started doing clay and, you know, pottery.

And she got me into acrylic lessons and oil, and I even got to do some glassblowing, some printmaking, stained glass, woodworking.

I mean, I've done a little bit of everything, but I really enjoy doing watercolor most.

And so you go to Loyola and study art?

Yes.

So, before I went to Loyola, my mom got me a private art instructor who was a professor at Delgado.

I know how well I know I have somebody here, I know.

Oh, good.

One of the things that's a little bit different about me is that it's easier for me to lay down than to sit up for an extended period of time, because I start to get pain in my back, and it's really hard for me to hold my arm up for a long time.

And so things look very different when you're laying down than when you're sitting up.

So you have to draw what you see and not what you think you see.

So she would actually lay on the floor with me and say, okay, yeah, this is this is what you're doing wrong.

I know it looks wrong, but when you pick it up, it's going to look right.

And it did.

And it took me a long time to learn that, very hard.

But, I did learn it.

And so by the time I got into college, I thought I was going to go into fine art.

And but then I realized there was a reason they call them starving artists.

And I said, well, I don't know that I can put out enough art to make a living.

So I switched my major in my sophomore year, the beginning of my sophomore year, to graphic design.

And so I also do today.

I do a lot of branding and social media management and logo work.

I remember the first thing I ever saw you did was at the LSU vet school.

Gigantic painting.

Magnificent.

And you were like 15.

I was young.

That was commissioned by the librarian at the time of the LSU vet school.

She wanted me to do something called All Creatures Great and Small, and she wanted this giant painting to hang behind the desk at LSU vet school.

That was about all animals.

And so I did.

I created this painting.

It took forever because it was also an oil which I will probably never do again.

But it was watercolor, and I've talked to enough artists to know, watercolor is considered among the hardest to do.

That's what they say.

I, I don't know if I agree with that.

I think people who do oil don't like watercolor and vice versa.

People who do watercolor don't like oil, which is absolutely the case for me.

I like to look at it.

I mean, it's very pretty, but doing it.

I don't no no no no no.

It takes way too long to dry.

I don't have the patience for that.

You are certainly well known for your animal art, the portraits of real animals.

You somehow always capture the personality of that animal.

I try.

I started doing pet portraits in my parents office accidentally as a preteen because I was bored.

You know, I'd have to go there on Saturdays with my parents, and I would bring my paints or whatever, my drawing stuff, and I'd sit in the waiting room and draw people's pets while they waited.

People liked it, and eventually they just started handing me money for it.

They were like, oh, well, if I give you this picture, can you do it later?

And I'll pick it up and I'll give you 20 bucks.

And I'm like, oh, okay, this is great, you know.

And so, so I started doing that.

And then it just kind of evolved from there.

Everyone I've ever looked at, I feel like I know that animal.

Usually it's just it's in the eyes.

That's where an animal is most expressive.

How do you think your work has evolved, let's say, in the last five years?

Oh, it's definitely become more intricate.

So I really, really tried to focus on getting things right.

And my wildlife art is a little looser.

If I use a reference photo like, let's say I use a reference photo of an egret, and I say, I don't like that feather where it is, I'm changing it and I change it.

Nobody's going to know.

Now, of course, with this exhibition.

That is not the case.

But normally, normally that is the case.

I just think that that quiet time, that nature time, it's such a rewarding experience that just helps us kind of catch our breath.

You have lived a storytelling evolution, starting in radio, going to television and then still photography, although telling beautiful stories.

Take me there.

So radio began actually when I was in high school working at a station in Houma, Louisiana.

And the good thing about that station is that they had a very serious focus on local news.

It was very important.

And so I began learning how to write news that way.

And, you know, took broadcasting when I was in college as well.

And so I'm telling stories on radio.

In radio, you can tell a story in 20 to 30 seconds.

After doing that for a number of years, I transitioned to television as a reporter, working here in New Orleans.

And in TV, all of a sudden you had this new element of video that was now part of the story.

There was a moment early in my TV news career.

I think it was during the first Operation Desert Storm.

There was a National Guard group that was deploying.

They were up in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and we are out there before daylight.

It's foggy.

I'm there with the news photographer, and he's shooting the scene, and I'm making notes and figuring out who I may want to talk to.

And the camera is following this, this soldier who's carrying his big duffel bag and he's leaving.

He's kind of walking across the frame, and the camera's following him, and then it reaches a certain point.

The camera stops, the soldier walks out of the frame, and now in frame is this young woman who's holding a small child.

And it just blew me away with that image.

Said what it told you about what was happening to soldiers, to families, to children.

The photographer is looking at the story through a lens, through a camera.

I'm not.

And so that was really when I realized the power of using images, whether it's video or stills, to to tell a story.

But what's incredible is that now that you do Heart of Louisiana, you are the photographer.

You are the editor.

You are the person looking through the lens and you're the reporter.

So you mixed both.

Now I'm realizing, oh, hey, if we get out here early in the morning, that's going to be some really beautiful video.

When the sun comes up above this sugar cane field, you know, or, you know, stay another 30 minutes and let's go ahead and get the sunset behind this community or across this lake or over this, this bayou.

So I started being more aware of what makes a good image and what the camera's that I shoot video with.

It's one button for video, it's another button to click a still image.

And then I went and did some some landscape photography workshops with some really good professional photographers.

I mean, I've gone out to the Tetons, to Yosemite, to the Sierra Mountains, to to the Grand Canyon, to to all of these places where I'm getting some direct feedback.

I'm learning from, from pros who know how to do it.

And so I really kind of develop my skills.

I developed my eye and I just developed my passion for taking pictures.

And so as the evolution goes now, these still photos that you're taking of landscapes evolving into wildlife and again, alone in the Pirogue, staring at the bird, hoping for the perfect moment.

And at first the wildlife was just kind of a little exclamation point, a punctuation mark that was in my landscape.

And then I began to realize, okay, there's there's a story here.

There's a story with the animals, the birds, the alligators.

There's an alligator on the log.

So let's see how we work that into this landscape.

Let's get some nice pictures of the alligator.

I began to pursue those more and more.

I've gone to rookeries where the trees are just filled with egrets.

You know, parents fly into a nest to feed these, you know, 4 or 5 young egrets.

And these these little birds are nuts.

It's chaotic.

I mean, they're knocking each other out of the nest.

They're grabbing the other one's head and their beak.

I'm going, oh, my God, you know, they're going to kill each other.

But it's it's it's just being out there and spending time watching nature do its thing.

But you're also capturing the emotion of nature, whether it's those baby birds trying to get that food, or a bird becoming fearful because he hears something, you're capturing that in that moment.

There was a situation a few years ago, I was actually shooting a Heart of Louisiana feature out on Lake Martin, and it was a sunset paddle.

And we're paddling around and the sun gets behind the clouds and I'm going, well, okay, I'm not going to be a great sunset.

So we all got out of our kayaks and I'm loading up my car, close the trunk, look up, and I just see this bright orange coming through the trees.

I'm going, something has changed here.

And I grabbed the camera, grabbed the tripod, and I just start clicking away.

Shooting video, shooting stills.

I almost missed this.

How do you define for yourself what a successful photograph is?

There's my reaction to the picture.

I mean, does it convey what what I was experiencing?

But I think another one of the real litmus test is what does it make you feel?

It's like, oh, that reminds me of such and such a place that we used to go to with my daddy when we go fishing or duck hunting, you know, they put they put their own stories to it.

Had I not been trying to capture pictures, I never would have had any of these moments.

Yeah.

I wouldn't have been there.

Let's talk about the incredible relationships you've built through your love of live music.

Because everybody loves you.

You get to sit on the front row most of the time, right?

Well, no, I mean, I, I aim to sit on the front row most of the time.

I love live music.

I pretty much live for my next concert.

My dad took me to my first concert when I was ten, and it was Alabama, and we had a great time and ever since I just.

What is it about live music?

I don't know, I mean, I like the feeling you get when you're in the crowd and everybody's singing the same words and everybody's happy.

You know, we have so much bad in the world right now that, like, you know, it's just stand there for a couple of hours and sing is.

And nobody cares if you think badly because nobody can hear you.

It doesn't matter.

Which is good for me, because that's the only way I sing, is badly.

We followed Sugarland, A Little Big Town and Florida Georgia Line.

We've seen Elton John a couple times.

Blake Shelton, Keith Urban, Harry Connick.

Oh, I recently met John Stamos, a Jazz Fest, which was my God.

I mean, I grew up with Uncle Jesse, so like that was that was a big deal for me.

Reba McEntire.

I met her in my 20s, which my first CD that I ever bought with my own money was one of hers.

Well, it's also the combination of your love of live music and your incredible art that brought you to the secret love of Rod Stewart.

Not that secret.

Yeah, yeah it did.

Basically, he and I met a Jazz Fest about 7 or 8 years ago.

I spent like an hour with him that night and his band talking, and he asked me if I wanted to try to do his album cover that was coming out.

He had an album coming out about three months later.

It came down to two designs, one of which was mine, one of which was somebody else's, polar opposites.

I mean, not at all the same.

And he chose the other one, which is fine.

But he did pay me, which was nice, and he gave me tickets to another show.

You have a friendship?

Yeah.

He graciously gives me tickets when I want to see, when I can see him.

But you also did portraits of his, I did, I did.

It took him a little bit, but he got me a picture and yeah, it turned out good.

He loved it.

With all that you do you still have hobbies?

I love to go hiking.

We have some wonderful trails around Louisiana.

We have trails along bayous and lakes, and we have trails through hilly landscapes.

I mean, an hour and 20 minutes from the French Quarter, you can be up in Bogue Chitto State Park, and there's about a 5 or 6 mile loop trail where the elevation change before you're over is about 200ft.

That's a good little workout.

A few years ago, I did a night photography workshop out West, out in, out in the Grand Teton National Park, and where I learned all about the Milky Way, these things that I had read about in eighth grade science but had never experienced.

And come to find out, it's it's there.

We just don't look for it.

That's become a hobby of mine, kind of learning more about what's around us and just really hoping that that that people find an opportunity to, to get out and experience what's all around us.

You know.

Well, perhaps your very work in landscape and in nature is doing just that is encouraging somebody.

I want to be there.

You make it so real.

And so I don't look at your pictures and not feel an emotion.

I saw this, this spoonbill that was kind of coming in and out from behind the trees.

And at one point he kind of stopped and kind of looked at us.

We should call this one something like peekaboo or something.

I think that would work.

I like it a lot.

I love spoonbills.

Each of you tell me thoughts on the other.

Kathryn, for starters, is a remarkable painter.

I love the detail, the the, the personality that she brings out and anything that she pays.

She truly is an inspiration in what she has accomplished and how she pushes herself and pushes others.

And that's what I take away from this.

Dave spoils me.

You know, it's I'm getting perfect photos from him and they're beautiful and they're beautiful to look at.

I admired him for doing his Heart of Louisiana series, because he gets to go and do all of these different stories on things that we wouldn't know about otherwise that are here in our state.

What do each of you want?

A person who goes to your exhibit to walk away with?

A new perspective.

I mean, because I think that most people don't look at animals in the way that we're looking at them.

I mean, we're purposely looking at them.

I just think the idea of taking a few minutes and looking at what's there, I'm looking at those landscapes with the birds and the occasional alligator.

We have so many different kinds of birds in Louisiana.

They're just gorgeous.

It is a dual vision.

It is.

And it's it's what each of you have brought to your own vision of it, which makes the whole thing unique and very special.

The bird lifts its leg and it just held it like that.

This wasn't just a one second deal.

Yeah, this was one of the first photos I chose that I really, really liked.

It was like they were having this parade along the shoreline of the bayou there.

I, I'm thinking maybe calling this one second line.

There you go.

What do you think?

Yeah, I like that.

And this is like the early morning sunlight.

Yeah.

Just hitting it.

So it's it's it's lit up with this nice warm light.

And it had just come in for a landing.

I've done a lot of pelicans but never one with this much orange in it.

And it's really pretty.

And the fact that the background is like an off blue, it makes it stand out even more.

[guitar playing]