Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is pleased to announce that abstract artist Kathy Blankley Roman has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 30 days.   

Kathy was born and raised in Chicago, IL and  is an award winning artist known for her expressive abstract paintings. All her life she has been making art of one kind or another. After high school, she relocated to Madison, WI to attend the University of Wisconsin, in a field only loosely related to art. With little formal training, she learned her craft mostly through workshops or classes at her local art centers. In her mid-years, she became proficient in calligraphy, which was shown in numerous juried exhibits and small group shows.

She taught it at Madison Area Technical College when she returned to school there to study commercial art. This led to work in the graphic design field, freelance illustration and a return to Chicago. After her retirement in 2010, she started painting her current abstract work when studying nonobjective expressive painting with arts educator and author Steven Aimone. Shortly after that, she added encaustic painting to her repertoire and more recently, she started painting with oil and cold wax medium.

Her expressive paintings have been shown in juried and small group shows nationally and online including numerous appearances in Light, Space & Time competitions. In 2014 she was chosen as a finalist in the 32nd Annual Competition of The Artist’s Magazine and was accepted into the highly competitive National Art Encounter 2015 at the von Liebig Art Center, Naples, FL.

Kathy’s intuitive paintings are process driven and reflect her connection to the world around her. Using acrylics and various drawing media or beeswax, oil paint and pigment–adding, then taking away, painting over, scraping back–her paintings develop depth and a sense of history. She uses contrasting elements to create tension: warm colors vs. cool, texture vs. smooth and high energy marks supported by calm, muted colors. The process she uses of layering and scraping in her acrylic paintings translates easily to her encaustic work and to oil paint with cold wax medium.

Manipulation of a limited palette plus the use of contrasting textures defines her current work, creating the illusion of depth and motion, subtle yet full of energy, while evoking feelings of peace and calm. Kathy continues to explore and experiment with different media and ways of creating. Ultimately, it is all about the process and the physical act of creating: becoming the brush, responding to the surface, the visceral feeling of engaging it, the discovery, the evolution of the painting as it changes; and then finding the delicate balance between intuition and intention to bring the composition to a satisfying conclusion.

Kathy maintains a studio and lives in Chicago.  Her website is www.kbromanart.com