​One of the most frequent questions an artist gets asked is "where do you get your inspiration from"? My answer is most often "everywhere".  Nearly everything is see is filtered through the lens of a potential painting or composition, interpreted through my sense of color and desire to catch something fleeting and give it a moment in time. Hopefully the spark I see is captured in a two-dimensional representational piece of artwork, that has a life of its own. Nature, for me, is the greatest teacher, and offers a continual seasonal display of color filled nuances and potential palettes to draw from.
 
I am fortunate to have found a medium and style to support my work ethic/style as an artist. When I am inspired I work rather quickly and without overthinking, mostly relying on my instincts for color and composition. In between painting, I daydream toward the next painting.

Working in acrylic paints, allows the medium to dry quickly, and enables me to move through an idea from concept to finish in a matter of days or weeks, instead of the usual months required for other mediums to dry. In order to achieve a high color saturation and dramatic layered effect, I build up pigment layers with glazing mediums and soft or heavy polymer gels. Despite the fact that acrylic paints can never truly achieve the deeply translucent quality of an oil based painting, they can afford an artist such as myself, quite a broad range of pigment options and full saturation. 

While I admire artists that are highly trained in their areas of discipline, I consider myself more of an outsider artist, or a refined folk artist, because I let the story take the lead, and try to follow it with my medium. Often, I will incorporate found papers, or thrift memorabilia, puzzle pieces, or raffle tickets, old bingo cards, vintage playing cards that are then painted over and incorporated into the under story of the painting. Each of those found objects has a unique history, which when combined with my personal story, creates a humanly diverse layered narrative.

I enjoy the process of storytelling through paint. It makes my heart sing. It makes me deeply content to see another person revel in a shared story for a moment. I love the expression and exploration of finding what to say, and how to say it. Often times, words can be an awkward attempt to illuminate what is in one’s inner landscape, and as an artist, I try to turn my insides, out, and allow them to have a voice of their own.


Thank You for stopping to listen~
Katharina Magdalena Short