Über

Painter Kate Nelson is drawn to and moved by the outdoor life. The exuberance of her life (skiing, hiking, sailing) and its contemplative aspect (gardening, yoga, poetry) are both mirrored in her lyrical abstract paintings.
She has studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (there, influenced by Chuck Close, Keith Hollingworth, and John Grillo), at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, at Haystack Mountain School, Deer Isle, Maine and worked in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Nelson paints in her barn-studio in Brewster.

“Color happens in the moment we’re looking at it. It happens in real time. Like music. Like jazz. Jazz was born in passion, nurtured by musical structure and grown by improvisation. My painting is like jazz — disciplined yet free, spare yet full, within a rich tradition yet achingly personal.

I work from intuition, from impulse, using physical reflexes honed in hard physical labor and senses sharpened by a life in the outdoors."