KATHY SNOW STRATTON is a contemporary abstract painter based in Buffalo, MN. She is a native of the state of Maine.  She credits the Maine woods for her breakthrough into abstract painting. The overlapping complexity of branches through dense trees in the afternoon light of winter inspired her creations.

“Layers of vigorous line characterize Kathy Stratton's paintings. Stratton builds densely layered images out of angling, slightly arching strokes. Looking at the paintings, a viewer can feel the artist's hand entering and exiting the surface countless times and imagine that the act of making holds meditative potential for the artist. In some works the strokes dissolve into misty, gray fields, in others they remain deliberate and defined like the overlapping and precise shadows of grasses or the bare tree limbs in the densest of forests conceivable." —Kristin Hileman, Assistant Curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian of International Modern and Contemporary Art, Washington,DC

By increments Stratton's painting has moved away from the subject of Nature. Raised in Skowhegan, Maine, her early work bore a close connection with the beauty of nature found in her home state. As an undergraduate student at the University of Maine at Orono, she studied landscape painting in the Catskill Mountains where she was introduced to the style of the Hudson River School of Painting.  Her first visit to Frederic Edwin Church's estate Olana with painter and mentor George Wexler, professor at SUNY, New Paltz, NY, influenced her painting for decades to come. Stratton's early paintings captured the unique light, beauty and sense of place that is Maine. Upon returning to Maine to live in 2001 and to the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, MD to finish her MFA in Studio Painting, Stratton's work turned from Romantic landscape painting to Contemporary abstract painting.

“Kathy Snow Stratton weaves nearly monochromatic color fields by dripping paint across up-ended canvases, then rendering thread-like lines across its surface.  The end result is quiet canvases that seem simple, but harbor great complexity and visual texture upon close inspection.  They feel like islands of calm sanctuary in the rolling sea of chaos that makes up modern life as we know it."  —Tom Whipple, Northern Virginia Art Beat, Arlington, VA

Kathy Snow Stratton was until recently a Professor of Drawing, Painting and Printmaking with the Adjunct Art Faculty for John Tyler Community College, Chester, Virginia and an Artist Educator at the Center for Visual and Performing Arts, Chesterfield County Public Schools, Chester, Virginia. She has also taught art for Ellsworth School Department, Ellsworth, Maine; Frederick County Public Schools, Frederick, Maryland; Fairfax County Public Schools, Springfield, Virginia and North Penn School District, Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

Stratton has shown her paintings in galleries in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern United States. She now lives in the Minneapolis Area and recently showed in Unexpected Ends, Redepenning Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins, MN and juried the Oil/Acrylic/Mixed Media Painting Class 1 at the 2024 Minnesota State Fairs 113th Fine Arts Juried Exhibition, Falcon Hills, MN. 

When not painting in her Minnesota lakefront home studio, Stratton can be found floating in her Scott canoe on one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with her husband, Fred.

ARTIST STATEMENT

To be in between is to be betwixt, among, amidst and amid. Interstices the spaces in between brushstrokes interest me. For twenty years as an abstract painter their interactions, spatial visual shifts and illusive meanings have suggested and invited contemplation. I am moved to paint harmonic fields of these charged spaces. In these fields I find associative meanings or rather they find me. Each painting is a unit or part of something larger and unfolds its context in the making.  Initially intentional in process these paintings are guided, emotive and intuitive. Through painting I attempt to approach the universal and the unknowable even though I accept it as an impossibility.

With a similar and specific construct of self imposed limitations, each painting is created as one in a series of three. This opens up rather than constricts possibility for me. My painting process is simple. With each series I impose initial rules and start all the canvases the same. The size canvas I will stretch is determined and its orientation. The color ground is selected and the brushstroke is chosen. I simultaneously drip paint on all three works and embrace the feeling of powerlessness and the haphazardness as the drips slowly begin to paint the canvases. I consider the vertical and the horizontal.  Each work is then worked individually to completion with applications of calligraphic gestural brushstrokes. Learning to be patient, peaceful and perseverant is vital as I trust my imposed process. Through this method unified layers result forming complex optically charged harmonic fields. 

In our otherwise chaotic and random world there is in my view a universal order of truth and light that connects us all. There is something both pure and perfect about this assumption that moves me to paint. Each work reveals a personal assertion of truth and engages me like no other. They transport, test, and surprise me with their realm of possibility and specificity. Associations by the viewer of rose windows, tapestries and architecture may be asserted. For me it is about being in the painting and being on the very edge of knowing. I am pleased these works confront one to see not just look.