From A History of Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 - 1980, by Thomas Albright
Painter. Born in Tomahawk, Wis.; attended U.C. Irvine (B.F.A 1971) and SFAI (M.F.A. 1973). In The Rooted Men (1981), thirteen big oil paintings designed to hang together as a circular mural, she used the forms of old knarled trees as metaphors for the cycle of growth and decay, in a style that combined a rich abstract Impressionism with a dramatic action painting.
The Carousel, acrylic on canvas; 12' by 8', 1982	The images, intense and sef-contained, together tended to blur into a whirl that seemed to draw the viewer directly into a cyclical vortex of movement-an idea Kirchmeier continued to explore in a monumental single painting, Carousel, and in a series of paintings in which moving images on city streets were abstracted to blurs and shimmers on the very threshold of perception. These were painted in acrylic, in a light-saturated style in which photographic imagery burst into a loose, gestural calligraphy. Kirchmeier was also practically alone among Bay Area artists in bringing credibility to the genre of portraiture. Read more from Thomas Albright about The Rooted Men