Kathy Snow Stratton is an Abstract Contemporary Painter and 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.
"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 work 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 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.
When not painting at her Minnesota lakefront studio home and designing gardens she can be found floating in her Scott canoe on one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with her husband Fred.