About

Catherine Adamski Kennedy is an American artist living and working in rural New England. Growing up north of Los Angeles, CA, then in Portland, OR, she studied Chemistry, painting, and sculpture, eventually earning a Minor in Fine Arts from the University of Montana in 1990 while studying art under Tom Rippon. She then received a B.S. in Botany and Horticulture Science from Oregon State University in 1995. After starting a small farm business with her husband, then earning her M.Ed. while teaching for nearly two decades, she returned to her first love of painting at New Hampshire Institute of Art, eventually receiving her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art & Design in Cambridge, MA. Drawing upon her diverse background, the macro and micro of the natural world provide a wellspring of inspiration for her studio practice.

Imbued with symbolic and literal references from her dual artistic and scientific background, her work is characterized by a vivid palette with hand-mulled pigments, complementary colors, geometric abstraction, and passages of tonal variation. In addition, her work is intricately layered with overlapping applications of varying opacity, sheen, reflective facets, textural surfaces, and light-absorbing elements.

Her work explores human experience, empirical knowledge, and intuition. It addresses the liminal space between everyday contemporary life and the timelessness of the natural world. Her abstractions explore the mysteries of the psyche without the distraction of literal images.

My paintings are personal reflections and interpretations of the natural world, spiritual intuitions, and life events. They are the result of an always emerging practice of inquiry and discovery that I allow to influence the direction of the painting. They generally evolve through a multi-phased process utilizing both opaque and transparent layers. They begin with bold, gestural brushstrokes and then further develop through a more tempered, meditative approach, leaving the underpainting to emerge in places untouched. Finally, the work gradually progresses through additive and subtractive techniques, allowing the process to reveal the essence of what wants to be expressed.

Within her place-based practice, her paintings address themes of interconnection, the natural world, meditative experience, the interweaving of light, motion, memory, and the passage of time. Her imagery is frequently expressed through atmospheric and metaphoric veils and repetition.

Kennedy’s work has been exhibited and is held in private collections in Montana, California, Oregon, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. She is married with two grown children.