Kathryn Kampovsky American, b. 1997

Kathryn Kampovsky, is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She creates layered paintings using oil and acrylic using intentional and varied color palettes. With a focus in figurative painting, she explores her interest in the unconscious desire to prepare for an unpredictable world. Her work aims to understand the ways that daily life, technology, and life events permeate the brain and body in ways that make the flesh inseparable from the outside world. The flesh of her larger-than-life figures, towing the line between the intimacy of a figure painting, and the modernity of its tools. Using maligned perspectives and transparency, the figures appear to be inextricable from their environments and melting into their outer worlds.

For Kathryn, any natural cycle begins in bed, or from a place of rest. Birth to death, morning to night, rest to exhaustion. The bed is indistinguishable from life itself. The painting process begins and ends as naturally and forcefully as sleep, sex, birth. The studio is indistinguishable from an artist. Her figures are participating in these environments through paint, welding the two together with layers of color, connective tissue. Bruised blues and purples. Browns and greens of skin dissolved by time. Fatty yellows sweeping beneath networks of oxygenated reds and pinks. One rule Kathryn applies to paintings in my practice, is being able to dig through to the first layer of paint with the naked eye. When the beginning and end of a painting have become inseparable, the veil closes. Kathryn's interest, beyond anything else, is to create a painting that contains visual diary of time spent with it. Each layer and stroke of paint will dictate the next. The final painting cannot exist without the day before it, and so forth and so on until that first moment with a blank canvas.