Katya Strong

I became interested in art when I realized that art was a way of expressing how a person sees the world, colored by the unique experiences they bring with them. A person can never be another person, can only ever live one life and have one continuous perspective, but when that person sees the art that another person has made, it is the closest possible thing to being someone else and touching their heart. Because of that, I wanted to make symbolic paintings with a strong focus on the organic.   

Nature, to me, is a universal beauty with potential to express a wide swath of emotion. In my portfolio, there are several paintings of flowers with titles that correspond to music albums. In that project, I listened only to those albums while I painted, to convey the particular sensation that the music creates in me. I also have several abstract “blue” paintings in my portfolio, which were an ongoing project to immerse myself in the surrealist mindset. Many surrealists believed that the art they wanted to create lived in the subconscious, and the only way to release it from there was to create art without the artist’s conscious input. I made those abstract paintings without planning, with a limited palette, painting without anxiety over how the final work would look, moving instinctually to create a balanced work.