Artist Statement

I paint what I can't always put into words: the feeling of a place, the changing of a season, the experience of becoming someone new. Nature is my starting point, not just for its beauty, but for what it teaches me. Landscapes change. Light moves. Growth requires both reaching and release. In the studio, I work intuitively—mixing colors, building and scraping away layers, and following a mark wherever it leads. My paintings are less about depicting a particular place than capturing the feeling of being alive. They explore growth, uncertainty, release, trust, and the tension between the life we envision and the one actually in front of us.

Bio

Stephanie Kathryn is an abstract painter, writer, hiker, and lifelong seeker of a more authentic life. She has spent years exploring wild places on foot, and those experiences continue to shape the way she sees and paints the world. Inspired by the shifting colors and light of the natural world (and by lessons gleaned from the trail), Stephanie is especially drawn to moments that ask us to look up: sunlight filtering through a canopy of leaves, a sudden clearing in the trees, or a landscape transformed by changing light. Sometimes, you just have to look up to find the beauty that's already there. She translates these experiences into expressive paintings, using nature as metaphor for our inner landscapes and our most honest selves.

After earning a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Alabama, Stephanie spent more than a decade working in communications before returning to painting in 2017. She works from her home studio in Alabama, where she follows curiosity, intuition, and the unexpected turns of the creative process. She believes a beautiful life is not something we find, but something we make (and remake) as we learn to loosen our grip, follow what calls us, and boldly become more of ourselves.