Kathryn Beals

Kathryn Beals is a self taught professional painter from British Columbia, with an educational background in forestry.  Her art draws inspiration from the Canadian north and her time spent backpacking in the Rockies and the Sierras. Now a full time painter, Kathryn lives in California with her husband and three young children.

A traditional landscape painter since childhood, her early acrylic work was influenced by her synesthesia and migraine auras, forming her signature style of radiating patterns in the night sky.  Her surreal landscapes are inspired by dreams and places she has been in the backcountry.

Kathryn discovered fluid acrylic pouring in 2017, and embraced the beauty of its random nature.  She began to incorporate paint pours into her landscapes, painting landscape details by hand and embellishing with metal leaf over top of abstract acrylic pours.  To gain confidence with this new technique and to give back to the places that inspire her, she used her new Fluid Landscapes style to raise money for environmental and humanitarian causes, painting over 100 paintings for benefits in 2018, and donating the $10K she raised to nonprofits.

She initially developed her own metal leafing technique as a way to add structure to the unpredictable abstract fluid pours.  She uses Speedball gilding adhesive to trace the natural lines in her paint pours, adding flash and dimension to her abstracts.  She refined her metal leafing further to create landscape details such as trees and glacial rivers in her Fluid Landscapes, embellishing gold, silver and copper treelines onto abstract night skies.  Kathryn also began working with resin in 2017, and developed a three dimensional mixed media layering technique to create intricate forests out of metal leaf.

She also incorporates metal leaf into her newest style, surreal cross sections of northern landscapes with aurora borealis and sparkling geodes inside the earth.  She will be launching an online course on her leafing method in 2019.