Kathryn Kerr

, 2024
Oil and acrylic on canvas
64 x 76 inches



, 2024
Oil, acrylic, and Flashe on canvas
64 x 76 inches


, 2024
Oil and acrylic on canvas
54 x 66 inches


, 2024
Oil and acrylic on canvas
38 x 44 inches


 is a diaristic show–a collection of experiences, techniques, and visions describing a perceived world. Sometimes, it is an amalgam of fiction and reality–a bat transforms into an orange glow in 

. Or it is often an ode to an artist like Manet–his last flower paintings, or Max Ernst–his collages. Indeed, it is a way to translate an inner world into color and form. I use divergent ways of making to create harmonious sets of paintings unified by hue, recurrent shapes, and themes. What emerges is an exploration of wanderings and associations to record a subjective experience and imagination, to make that felt, and to play with a painting’s potential.

These paintings were made primarily in Bovina, New York, and the outside–the birds, the trees, and the friends I made there–entered the paintings and influenced their forms. 

 is a kitchen sink painting: the remnants and colors of the other pieces in

 migrated into its frame, becoming the map or key to this set of works. The cedar waxwing’s feathered breast, a gentle gradient of sienna to sea gray, built the arc in 

. Broken remnants of an eastern tiger swallowtail transformed into 

. An apocryphal story from the local car mechanic: John Lennon lay on a hill in the nearby town and declared, “A man could die here,” seeped in and transmuted into an underlying rhythm within the suite of paintings. And a dense forestscape in the distance drifted into the pointillist windows of 

. These observations and idiosyncrasies, along with the joyful scrutiny of painting’s possibilities, brought forth the materialization of 